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What happens when faith becomes something you measure yourself against instead of something you live by? BY THE GRAPE OF GOD starts with a premise that feels almost deceptively light, then tightens its grip as it reveals what it’s actually interested in examining. This is not really a movie about wine, or even about religion in the institutional sense. It’s a character study about comparison, resentment, and the panic that sets in when a life built on belief begins to feel hollow.

What does hope mean when it has to coexist with addiction, exploitation, and survival rather than replace them? HOLY GHETTO asks that question without romanticizing its answers. Set within Tel Aviv’s red-light district, the documentary turns its attention to people who live inside systems designed to erase them. Director iLan Azoulai doesn’t present their stories as cautionary tales or inspirational arcs; instead, he frames them as ongoing negotiations with trauma, faith, and endurance.

What happens when a past decision, once thought inconsequential, suddenly ‘demands’ accountability decades later? That question is at the center of DAD GENES, a documentary that is never sensationalistic even as it tells a story that feels tailor-made for it. In an era where DNA tests casually rewrite family histories and private lives can become public property overnight, Craig Downing’s film chooses a more restrained, human-scale approach. It isn’t interested in shock; it’s interested in what people do after the shock has passed.

What do we owe our children when the damage we carry predates them? That issue endures throughout THE CONFESSION, a supernatural horror film that reaches for generational reckoning even as it struggles to keep its own mythology in check. Writer/director Will Canon builds the story around grief, inheritance, and moral debt, crafting a film that wants to unsettle both emotionally and spiritually, even if it never reconciles its ambition with execution.

What does it mean to document a place without turning it into a character? That question sits quietly at the center of GLENDORA, not as a thesis statement but as a guiding principle. Isabelle Armand’s first feature documentary isn’t quite an exposé or even corrective; instead, it positions itself as a long conversation, one built over half a decade of presence, listening, and shared time. The result is a film that feels less like an argument and more like an invitation to witness a community on its own terms. I wasn’t sure what to expect before starting the film, and even after watching it, I was still left with a lingering sense of so many unknowns.

What happens when a cabin-in-the-woods movie stops worrying about who the villain is and starts asking how quickly people turn on each other once fear sets in? CABIN FEVER opens with that underlying question simmering beneath its surface, immediately showing that Eli Roth wasn’t interested in delivering a standard genre film. Instead, his feature debut barrels forward with the confidence of someone who knows exactly how divisive the result will be and welcomes it. The film doesn’t ease you into its world; it drops you into a chaotic, intentionally uncomfortable situation, daring you to keep up.

What do we judge when the film in front of us was never allowed to finish becoming itself? QUEEN KELLY exists in that uncomfortable space between artifact and artwork, a film that cannot be separated from its collapse yet refuses to be dismissed because of it. Any serious engagement with this work has to accept that incompleteness isn’t a defect bolted onto the experience—it’s the experience. What survives is not a tidy narrative, but a raw exposure of ambition colliding with power, ego, censorship, and the end of an entire cinematic era.

What happens to trust when the future stops being abstract and starts knocking at your door? THE STRANGE DARK frames its central question with quiet confidence, stripping science fiction down to its most intimate stakes and asking how certainty corrodes relationships long before it saves them. This is a chamber thriller built less on spectacle than on erosion—of faith, of communication, of the fragile agreements that keep families functioning when reality no longer behaves as expected.

What happens when the thing that once defined you refuses to let you mature alongside the world? MYSTERY TEAM builds its entire identity around that question, then dares to stretch what should be a ten-minute sketch into a feature-length experiment that somehow survives on commitment alone. On paper, the concept sounds thin: former child detectives, now legally adults, still solving playground crimes while the rest of the world has moved on. In execution, though, the film leans so aggressively into that arrested state that it becomes less a parody of detective stories and more a portrait of people who never learned how to recalibrate their identity once the applause stopped.

What happens when a horror-comedy doesn’t care enough about scares or laughs? FULL MOON HIGH is one of those films that practically dares you to misunderstand it. On the surface, it looks like a goofy werewolf parody that came on the scene at the exact wrong moment, released in the same year as some genuinely transformative genre landmarks. That surface exploration is easy, and for many viewers, it’s where the conversation ends. But writer/director Larry Cohen was never interested in making things easy, and even his silliest film carries teeth beneath the fur.

What happens when a crime film is more in love with the idea of danger than the consequences that are supposed to come with it? A GANGSTER’S LIFE wants to kick the door open with confidence. From the first moments, it makes its intentions obvious, leaning hard into the image of the modern British gangster film, the kind that thrives on penetrating dialogue, fast cuts, and characters who believe they are far cleverer than they actually are. The problem is that confidence alone doesn’t equate to authority, and this film often mistakes surface-level ‘cool’ for actual control over tone, story, and consequences.

What happens when grief doesn’t want to be processed, but instead wants to be felt again and again, no matter the cost? COME CLOSER begins inside that unresolved ache and never pretends there’s a way out of it. Written and directed by Tom Nesher, the film is intensely personal, shaped by loss, and that authenticity bleeds into every creative choice. The story follows Eden, a young woman whose identity has been tethered to her brother, Nati. When he dies suddenly, the rupture isn’t just emotional; it’s existential. Eden doesn’t know who she is without him, and rather than learning how to exist alone, she searches for a way to keep him present by proxy. That search leads her to Maya, the secret girlfriend she never knew existed, and the film’s central relationship is born from that collision of mourning and curiosity.

What would you agree to if the money sounded easy enough and the people offering it kept smiling like it was all just a joke? CHEAP THRILLS opens with that deceptively simple question and then spends the rest of its runtime stripping away every excuse you might use to answer it without flinching.

What does it take for an “honorable” man to admit he’s in a rigged game? BLOOD OF REVENGE drops you into Osaka with a premise that sounds familiar on paper—rival gangs, business dealings, and public respectability used as camouflage. Director Tai Kato treats that setup less like a springboard for nonstop action and more like a vise. The story’s fuel isn’t gunfire or body counts, it’s procedure: who controls labor, who controls construction, who gets to claim authenticity, and who’s forced to swallow insults because retaliation would ignite the entire city. That focus makes the movie feel more advanced than a lot of genre counterparts that sprint straight to the payoff, and it gives the drama room to breathe even when you can already sense where it’s headed.

What happens when success, independence, and status fail to protect you from the structures designed to break you? SPLENDID OUTING opens with that unsettling thought embedded in its premise, and it never lets go. Kim Soo-yong’s 1978 film plays out like a waking nightmare, one that begins in the world of professional achievement and ends in a suffocating landscape of control, denial, and enforced identity. What makes the film so enduring and so disturbing is how it presents its cruelty, as if to insist that this is not an anomaly but an extension of the society that produced it.

What happens when a story older than recorded history is filtered through streaming culture, the internet, AI, and the fragile hope that art can still connect people in a digital void? COSMIC PRINCESS KAGUYA! doesn’t shy away from that question; instead, it leans into it with a very specific style, and a sincere belief that music can still function as emotional truth in a hyper-mediated world.

How much discomfort do we tolerate in everyday interactions before acknowledging that something is actually wrong? That uneasy question is the core powering WITH ARMS RAISED, a short that understands something basic about fear; it doesn’t always equal a jump or a scream. Sometimes it shows up as forced friendliness, awkward laughter, and a driver who keeps choosing to “smooth things over” because that feels safer than honesty.

What does it mean to bear witness when the world would rather move on, and what responsibility does that place on the person who survived when so many others didn’t? ELIE WIESEL: SOUL ON FIRE builds itself around that question with a permanence that feels both deliberate and necessary, refusing to frame the tale with moral clarity. Rather than positioning Wiesel as a fixed historical icon, the film presents him as a man shaped by memory that never stopped encroaching, a survivor who understood that remembrance was not a passive act but a discipline that had to be practiced, defended, and repeated even when audiences grew tired of listening.

Do stories survive because they are remembered, or because forgetting them would force us to confront what we’ve lost? There’s a specific level of creative ambition that rarely survives modern distribution models. It’s the kind that assumes an audience is willing to listen actively, sit with ideas, and follow a work through tonal shifts without being held by the hand. THE MUSEUM OF THE OMNIVERSE: DRAGON EXHIBIT lives in that space. It isn’t content designed for multitasking or background consumption. It’s an audio anthology that asks for time, attention, and curiosity, then rewards those investments with a structured experience that feels intentional and deeply human.

What if Camelot wasn’t merely a presidency remembered, but an image constructed, shaped by a man whose camera defined how a nation would remember its promise? CAPTURING KENNEDY understands something many documentaries miss: history is not only determined by events, but by who is allowed close enough to witness them. This film doesn’t position itself as another examination of the Kennedy presidency, nor does it attempt to reexamine a legacy that has already been dissected from every imaginable angle. Instead, it shifts perspective, placing the camera in the hands of a man whose proximity to power shaped how the world remembers an era. That choice proves to be the film’s greatest strength.

OUTLAWS & LAWMEN: 10 TV WESTERNS COLLECTION was never trying to reinvent the genre or reframe the mythology of the American frontier. What it does instead is something far more honest and, in many ways, more valuable. It preserves a specific era of television storytelling where character, restraint, and moral clarity mattered more than excess or revisionism. This is a collection that understands the Western as a space for reflection as much as for action, and its cumulative effect is stronger than any single title. I’ll be the first to admit that westerns aren’t my favorite genre. Still, there was something uniquely telling about how these films built upon one another into a collection with a distinct voice and an experience that knew what it was trying to get across.

OBEX is a unique viewing experience in almost every way. The black-and-white imagery, the deliberate stillness, and the tactile presence of outdated technology all suggest it's not interested in guiding an audience. Instead, it asks for patience, curiosity, and a willingness to sit inside discomfort. Albert Birney has built a career around idiosyncratic, deeply personal projects, and this feels like one of his most distilled expressions yet; intimate, strange, and intentionally alienating in ways that feel purposeful rather than careless.

THE R.I.P MAN comes onto the scene with grandiose ideas of franchise aspirations (and to be fair, the sequel is already in pre-production). From its title to its marketing language, this is a film that wants to introduce a new horror villain, one meant to linger, provoke, and justify sequels. Unfortunately, what it delivers instead is a rough, uneven slasher whose central idea never quite survives contact with execution.

STORK OF HOPE carries an enormous emotional burden, one shared by countless World War II dramas before it. What distinguishes it, and what ultimately limits it, is its determination to frame unimaginable trauma through gentleness rather than confrontation. This is a film driven by memory and moral clarity, one that prioritizes accessibility over historical abrasion, sometimes to its benefit and sometimes to its detriment.

JAMARCUS ROSE & DA 5 BULLET HOLES never pretends to be interested in reassurance. From its first frames to its devastating last, the film positions hope as fragile, real, and deeply vulnerable to interruption. What makes the short hit as hard as it does isn’t just the tragedy at its center, but the care taken to make that tragedy feel preventable right up until the instant it isn’t.