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There’s something wonderfully strange about describing a movie as a “psychoglitter thriller,” but THE BELLADONNA earns every part of it. Writer-director Javid Rezai surrounds grief, jealousy, and psychological instability with sequins, corsets, bright makeup, and the theatricality of a burlesque club. Instead of those two sides fighting each other, the glitter makes the darkness underneath much easier to see.

Before anyone says much of anything, COME THE NIGHTFALL has already made one of its strongest decisions. Tom Michaels shot his 23-minute horror short on 16mm, and that choice immediately gives the film a texture that would be difficult to reproduce digitally. The grain, heavier shadows, and slightly worn image quality aren't simply there to announce that Michaels likes older horror movies. They help establish the uneasiness of a story where almost everyone seems a little different from the person they're presenting to the world.

I owe CARRIE (Mike Flanagan, Prime Video, and basically everyone associated with this) an apology. From the moment this series was announced, I was 110% convinced that it captured exactly what frustrates me so much about Hollywood's obsession with remaking things that don't need remaking, and I don't think I've ever been happier to discover how completely wrong I was.

There’s something almost ridiculous about assigning enormous meaning to a nickel. It’s the kind of coin many people wouldn't bother bending down to pick up, worth so little that finding one normally wouldn't register beyond the next few seconds. NICKELS takes that insignificant object and asks what happens when grief gives it a meaning that money never could.

When I started screening BEGOTTEN, I had no clue what I was getting myself into. I stopped trying to decide if what I was watching was really a “movie” or an exploration. There’s no traditional dialogue, no real narrative structure, and not even the expected character development some experimental films have, and the images are so distorted that figuring out what is happening becomes a challenge in itself. E. Elias Merhige drops the viewer into something resembling a nightmare that the viewers shouldn’t even be allowed to see, and whether that sounds fascinating or unbearable will probably depend on what you’re willing to accept.

There’s something wonderfully ridiculous about watching two grown adults bury homemade creatures in horse manure because they might be able to predict the future. SMALL PROPHETS never treats that ridiculousness as a problem, nor does it spend much time trying to convince us that any of this makes sense. Mackenzie Crook instead asks us to accept that something impossible might be growing inside a suburban garden shed and then turns his attention toward the people desperate enough to believe in it.

Some movies are polished enough that you can almost forget somebody had to fight to get them made. UP IN HARLEM is the opposite. Paul E. Eliacin's independent drama wears nearly every limitation on its sleeve. Still, it carries the unmistakable feeling of someone with something specific to say and the determination to say it.

The scariest thing inside New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital isn't necessarily the creature hiding somewhere within its walls. THE TERROR: DEVIL IN SILVER repeatedly makes paperwork, medication schedules, locked doors, indifferent employees, and the simple inability to convince anyone that you're telling the truth feel just as threatening. That's where this third installment of THE TERROR is at its strongest, and also why its more traditional supernatural horror occasionally feels like it's interrupting the better story.

There’s something appropriately messy about a punk documentary that occasionally feels like somebody emptied decades of flyers, photographs, VHS tapes, club stories, and half-forgotten memories onto a table and decided to sort through all of it with us. OIL CAPITAL UNDERGROUND: THE GENESIS & EVOLUTION OF PUNK ROCK IN TULSA LATE 70S TO MID-90S may not always know when enough is enough, but there’s real value in how unwilling it is to let Tulsa’s underground music history quietly disappear.

The quickest way to make a nearly 70-year-old science-fiction movie feel its age is to ask it to predict the future. FORBIDDEN PLANET somehow survives that challenge because its version of tomorrow is so committed to being strange that realism almost stops mattering. The control panels, uniforms, enormous machinery, painted landscapes, electronic noises, and wonderfully bulky Robby the Robot don't resemble our world in 2026. However, together they create a future that still feels like someplace else.

THE PAPER doesn't need to become THE OFFICE to be successful, and in season 2 it finally seems to understand that well enough to stop reminding us so often that the connection exists, and the result is a more confident workplace comedy built around people becoming great at the jobs they originally stumbled into.

The irony about SAWTOOTH MOUNTAIN is that Bigfoot barely needs to be there for everything to go horribly wrong. Writer/director Matt Kincses starts our story with people who desperately want Sasquatch to be real, adds someone willing to fake that for money, and then watches an increasingly stupid series of decisions turn a tourist attraction into something far more dangerous.

GO feels like someone preserved a particular corner of 1999 before anyone realized it was worth saving. The clothes, grocery-store jobs, pagers, raves, casual drug use, soundtrack, and general lack of concern about making a responsible decision all belong to a specific moment, yet Doug Liman's movie has survived considerably better than plenty of films that were supposed to represent their generation more seriously.

GHOST IN THE CELL can go from a vicious murder to an absurd joke quickly enough to make you wonder whether Joko Anwar is daring the movie to fall apart. Then he'll throw in a prison fight, political satire, another grotesque body, and something supernatural before giving the characters room to be funny again. Keeping all of that under control seems almost impossible, which makes it strangely entertaining to watch Anwar keep testing how much one movie can hold.

It would be easy for a documentary about Twiggy to spend its runtime admiring photographs. There are enough famous images, magazine covers, hairstyles, clothes, and heavily copied poses to build an entire movie around how a teenager came to represent a particular moment in the 1960s. Sadie Frost’s TWIGGY is much more interested in the woman who somehow remained herself while everyone else was busy turning her into that image.