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The vampires in this spend so much time hissing that I started wishing someone would give them something more to do. THE TEENAGE VAMPIRE has the ingredients for an entertainingly corny horror movie, including landlords with a lot on their agenda, a party that goes terribly wrong, and a woman whose new independence comes with an unexpected problem. It struggles to keep you invested beyond that. It has a few redeeming touches and an ending with a little personality, but it gets there through awkward performances, distracting editing, and attempts at menace that rarely land. It knew what it wanted to be; it just wasn't quite sure how to get there.

Dating apps are supposed to make meeting someone easier, but anyone who's used one knows the experience isn't always pleasant. Between awkward conversations, questionable profiles, and the occasional disastrous date, there's already enough to worry about without imagining that the person on the other side of the screen might have something sinister in mind. For 24-year-old Sydney Loofe, an ordinary decision to meet someone through Tinder in November 2017 became the beginning of a horrifying criminal case that would eventually attract national attention. Director Brian Biegel revisits her story in SWIPE RIGHT ON THE DEVIL, a three-part Hulu documentary that examines a disappearance involving manipulation, unsettling beliefs, and people whose behavior becomes almost impossible to comprehend.

Twenty thousand dollars doesn't sound like enough money to make a movie, but it's certainly enough to destroy a relationship. Ask Johnny Penn, an aspiring filmmaker whose desperation to become a successful director leads him to make one spectacularly questionable decision after another. His determination to break into the industry provides the foundation for Francesco Lucente's THE INNER VOICE, a largely forgotten independent drama from the 1990s that returns through Ruby Max Entertainment in a newly remastered Collector's Edition. It's an interesting piece of independent filmmaking history, especially because it examines artistic ambition from a production operating within the very industry it's trying to portray.

Being rejected by someone you're in love with is painful enough, but experiencing that rejection while you're still together creates an entirely different kind of loneliness. You start questioning your appearance, your behavior, and everything else you once felt reasonably confident about. The person who used to make you feel desirable suddenly becomes the person you're desperately trying to impress, and the harder you try, the less recognizable you become to yourself. Swedish filmmaker Fanni Metelius examines this uncomfortable emotional territory in her feature directorial debut, THE HEART, a refreshingly candid relationship drama that asks why we're so willing to compromise our own happiness to preserve a relationship that no longer satisfies us.

Spending six years pretending to be someone else has to mess with your head. You build relationships, develop routines, and build an entire existence around a fictional identity, knowing you'll eventually have to abandon it all with little explanation. Returning to your real life shouldn't be the hard part. CIA operative Brandon Colby, better known by his codename Martian (Michael Fassbender), discovers that leaving his undercover assignment behind is much easier said than done. THE AGENCY, an American adaptation of the acclaimed French series THE BUREAU, takes this uncomfortable situation and builds an intelligent, frequently gripping espionage drama around people who have become so accustomed to lying that being truthful no longer comes naturally.

Cristian Mungiu has an extraordinary ability to make you question people you were confident you understood just moments ago. With FJORD, he twists that idea into uncomfortable territory, challenging our understanding of family, faith, tolerance, and the institutions we trust to protect us. I found myself repeatedly reconsidering where I was and what I was thinking, sometimes sympathizing with people whose beliefs I disagreed with, and other times questioning those who seemed to be doing everything right. That's what makes this film so exceptional. Mungiu isn't interested in making the audience feel complacent with its convictions, and I don't think I would've appreciated FJORD as much if he had. This extraordinary piece of filmmaking respects its audience enough to let us wrestle with the implications rather than forcing us to defend a position.

Being told something is impossible by the very people responsible for making it happen is one of life's most frustrating experiences. It's considerably worse when that supposed impossibility involves something as basic as having a bus stop in your neighborhood. Marcel Barrena takes that maddening bit of bureaucratic indifference. He turns it into THE 47, a historical drama about a working-class community that spent years fighting for something the rest of Barcelona took for granted. It's an uplifting story, certainly, but the circumstances that made it necessary are considerably less comforting.

Police work in movies usually involves a remarkable amount of excitement for a profession that, in reality, requires exhausting patience. Suspects don't conveniently appear when needed, informants aren't particularly dependable, and spending hours waiting for something to happen is hardly unusual. Jacques Deray's 1975 French crime thriller FLIC STORY understands this better than most, presenting a methodical pursuit of one of France's most notorious criminals without pretending that every moment of the investigation needs to be exciting. It's an interesting approach, though the film occasionally tests our patience as much as it does its protagonist's.

I tried to get THE WIZARD OF OZ out of my head while watching WICKER, but it kept finding its way back in. Maybe it's the fairytale world, the theatrical personalities, or simply seeing Alexander Skarsgård walk around as a man made entirely from wicker (straw?). Whatever the reason, the comparison stuck, even though the two films share little beyond their willingness to make the impossible feel ordinary. Writers/directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson have created a peculiar adult fairytale about a lonely woman, her handmade husband, and a village that can't handle seeing someone find happiness outside the rules. Adapted from Ursula Wills-Jones' short story THE WICKER HUSBAND, it's an imaginative, frequently funny, and occasionally frustrating film that puts considerable effort into creating a world unlike anything we're accustomed to seeing.

Couples therapy usually involves people sitting across from a professional, discussing problems they've spent weeks, months, or even years avoiding. Putting six people in the same room, removing the therapist, and expecting everyone to be honest with strangers sounds like an experiment designed to fail. That's the situation that we get to experience in BLOW THE HORN, writer/director Nacho Arenas' psychological drama about three couples whose relationships are subjected to an increasingly uncomfortable examination. Adapted from Matías del Federico's award-winning Argentinian play “Bajo Terapia”, the film uses the familiar setting of therapy and the complicated depth of romantic relationships to explore an exercise that quickly raises questions about honesty, privacy, and how much people really understand their partners.

Few families in TV history have had as much space in American pop culture as the Bradys. Its nine-square opening credits, impossibly catchy theme song, and six kids have remained fixtures of American pop culture long after the original series ended. That's quite an accomplishment for a sitcom that never ranked among television's thirty most-watched programs during its original run. Created by Sherwood Schwartz, THE BRADY BUNCH aired on ABC from 1969 to 1974 before finding a different level of popularity through syndication. Paramount's latest complete-series DVD collection brings together all 117 episodes across five seasons, offering nearly fifty hours of a family whose life problems rarely lasted longer than twenty-five minutes.

Michael Ironside has a particular talent for making even the most ridiculous movie villains feel genuinely unpleasant, and WATCHERS gives him plenty of opportunities to demonstrate it. As a ruthless government agent determined to recover the results of a secret experiment, Ironside stalks through this 1988 horror film with an authority that makes everyone around him seem expendable. He's considerably more frightening than the actual monster, which probably wasn't the intention. It's one of several unusual qualities that make director Jon Hess's adaptation of Dean Koontz's bestselling novel an enjoyable, if undeniably flawed, example of late-eighties horror.

The first time Ghostface gets high with Shorty, you just realize just how little interest SCARY MOVIE has in respecting the horror movies it's making fun of. Director Keenen Ivory Wayans isn't trying to offer genre fans the same meta wink SCREAM did. He wants to drag every slasher convention through the mud, throw in as many inappropriate jokes as possible, and see how much he can get away with before the credits roll. Twenty-six years later, some of those jokes haven't aged particularly well, but I'd be lying if I said this movie doesn't still make me laugh. It's immature, offensive, frequently ridiculous, and exactly the kind of comedy that Hollywood rarely seems interested in making anymore. 2026’s SCARY MOVIE tried, and sadly failed, to recreate that same style years later.

Somewhere between a wrongful arrest, a dangerous wilderness escape, and a conspiracy involving pharmaceutical experimentation, MANHUNT seems to forget that it started as a relatively straightforward crime thriller. Director Junya Sato takes a familiar story about an innocent man fleeing the authorities and gradually turns it into an increasingly outrageous adventure that barely resembles its opening act. Released in 1976, this Japanese production has enough unexpected developments to fill several movies. While it's wildly entertaining at times, its sprawling 151-minute runtime occasionally makes the experience feel like an endurance test.

A cowboy wandering through Mumbai in a bright red Western shirt and white Stetson sounds like the beginning of a comedy. And sure, the image is amusing, especially against the backdrop of crowded streets, neon lights, and one of the world's busiest cities. Writer/director Teddy Stern has something far more personal in mind with GETAR HERO, a 16-minute short that blends American Western imagery with Indian musical traditions to tell a surprisingly affecting story about artistic ambition, financial responsibility, and what people sacrifice just to get through another day.