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KUMAIL NANJIANI: NIGHT THOUGHTS feels less like a victory lap and more like a check-in. After nearly a decade away from the stand-up stage, Nanjiani returns not with a reinvention or a carefully manufactured “comeback” but with something more reflective. The decision to return to Chicago, where his stand-up career first began, gives the special an understated emotional grounding that informs everything that follows. There’s something heartwarming about the full circle and the appreciation that Nanjiani shows for the reality he lives in.

INSIDE, THE VALLEY SINGS is one of those films that quietly settles into your head and refuses to leave. At just fifteen minutes, it doesn’t waste time trying to shock or provoke through sensation or description. Instead, it builds something far more unsettling: an intimate, sustained portrait of what prolonged solitary confinement does to the human mind, and how imagination becomes both refuge and lifeline when all physical connection has been stripped away.

FREYR offers a twist with something that would be absurd in another film: a hand growing from a man’s chest. The image is impossible to process without curiosity. What would a life look like with a body so visibly different that strangers never learn to see anything else? Instead of treating the condition as a metaphor, the film places it within a funeral, where a coworker tries to make sense of the friendship that formed around that difference. By starting after Freyr is gone, the film collapses time. Everything we learn about him arrives through memory, grief, and the gratitude that comes from being truly seen by one person in a world that never learned how to look.

THE BOY WITH WHITE SKIN delivers into a sense of purpose that is immediate and unforced, grounding its story in the kind of reality that is rarely shown with this level of clarity. What unfolds is a portrait of a child whose presence is treated as both a gift and a burden, someone caught within a belief system older than he is, shaped by adults who view him as more of a symbol than an individual. Writer/director Simon Panay’s work is built on over a decade of on-the-ground immersion, and the depth of that commitment is evident from the details woven throughout the film. Even without stating it outright, you feel the years of observation behind every gesture, every glance, every unspoken rule that governs the mining community.

Something is compelling about watching two men cross each other with equal parts suspicion and longing for connection, and MY NEIGHBOR ADOLF leans into that with surprising tenderness. What begins as a clash between strangers slowly reveals itself as a story about the emotional weight people carry long after the world believes they should have healed. This film thrives not because of its mystery, but because of how it reframes paranoia, grief, and the possibility of companionship in the unlikeliest landscape.

MUSHROOM DAD offers up a unique experience as a short film that suggests a feature-length understanding of character, tone, and emotional timing. Michael Yuchen Lei’s story unfolds over the course of a single life-changing evening, set against the chaos of a restaurant opening, with something far more focused at its center. Julian, a young chef hoping to define himself through his craft, is confronted by the father he keeps at arm’s length. Their strained relationship is immediately evident in how they occupy the same space—Julian’s control clashing with his father’s dissolution, each trying to mask the emotional toll beneath their interactions. The film wastes no time establishing a sense of frayed connection. When the accident sends everything spiraling, it becomes clear that the chaos simply forces into the open what both men have been burying.

Some pandemic stories flood the screen with chaos because it makes the fear easier to process. NO MORE TIME goes in the opposite direction — it drains the world until there’s barely anything left. The setting of empty cabins in the mountains, half-finished sentences on the radio, and two people trying to hold onto themselves even as the world outside forces everyone into a state of survival that looks more feral than human. It’s a pandemic movie, but it isn’t recreating headlines. It’s more interested in the slow deterioration of trust when catastrophe becomes normal.

There’s a rule that most horror films embrace without question: fear is loud. Doors slam, footsteps echo, voices distort, and the score claws its way into the viewer like a physical force. HAUNTERS OF THE SILENCE rejects that approach. Its opening passages establish a different kind of dread — one built on stillness, interrupted breaths, and the quiet weight of unresolved memory. Rather than giving in to fear, it studies it, letting isolation become as threatening as any creature or loud jump scare. I want to start with clarity: this film wasn’t for me, but some will absolutely love it.

BITTER DESIRE offers up the kind of premise that could easily fuel a tight, grounded thriller: a wounded police officer, a nurse who isn’t who she claims to be, and a home that becomes a battleground for misplaced trust. Conceptually, it’s a setup built for tension. The problem is that the final film never finds a way to make that tension feel convincing. What emerges instead is a well-intentioned project that struggles to rise above its limitations, even though you can see the filmmakers cared deeply about getting it made.

A world-ending disaster usually brings along chaos, cities crashing into rubble, and a camera shouting over the noise. WE BURY THE DEAD works in the opposite direction. The catastrophe has already happened. It’s quiet now. Ash settles, bodies lie where they fell, and the survivors are left to clean up the pieces without answers or time to process. The film is built around a simple idea: when the dead refuse to stay buried, grief doesn’t disappear; it intensifies. Zak Hilditch approaches the premise with restraint, focusing less on gore and more on the fallout of a world that suddenly made no sense.

This documentary approaches Julian Assange like the eye of a storm, not a martyr standing on a hill. THE SIX BILLION DOLLAR MAN treats him as a symbol caught between governments, surveillance systems, fractured narratives, and the terrifying frame of a world where information itself is weaponized. Eugene Jarecki’s award-winning return to the political documentary form is the kind of film that’s less interested in what Assange did, moment to moment, than in what his existence reveals about how power operates today. It’s confident, concentrated, and structured with the tension of a political thriller, even as it tackles territory that’s been explored before. What’s new is the scale and the access.

DELINQUENT SCHOOLGIRLS is the kind of film that doesn’t ask whether its premise is appropriate, logical, or even remotely defensible. It simply launches into chaos with commitment, reflecting a period of exploitation filmmaking built on shock value, budgets, and whatever concept could draw attention on a marquee. Watching it today is less about the story—which barely exists—and more about experiencing a very specific corner of 1970s grindhouse cinema, one where boundaries were pushed mostly because no one involved believed any existed. This new addition to the PSYCHO TRONICA line embraces exactly that, packaging a notorious title with a much-needed restoration that leaves every rough edge intact.

TIMESTAMP is constructed without narration, interviews, or commentary, yet there is not a moment when the film feels silent. On the surface, it documents school life in Ukraine during the ongoing Russian invasion. That premise alone would suggest something direct and investigative, a chronicle of crisis through the eyes of children and teachers. Instead, the film achieves something more: it captures the persistence of the ordinary while the extraordinary becomes constant. Every scene appears calm, but danger is never more than a siren away. The documentary’s design makes normalcy feel like an act of resistance.

KILL THE JOCKEY feels like a film built of fragments of a nightmare that somehow reflect the logic of someone who no longer trusts reality. Luis Ortega structures the movie around a simple known truth: Remo was once good. He was a renowned jockey, admired, reckless, and so consumed by bad habits that talent couldn’t save him from becoming a liability. Everything that follows comes from that truth cracking open. The film begins in the world of debt, violence, and desperation, and by its final stretch, it becomes something symbolic rather than literal.

FLATHEAD grounds itself in the return of a man to a place that shaped him long before he understood what shaping meant. Cass Cumerford’s late-life journey back to Bundaberg isn’t framed as a grand pilgrimage or a dramatic reckoning. Instead, it plays out as a conversation with the past spoken in pauses, glances, and stories pieced together from strangers who seem to know him without really knowing him. The film meets Cass without nostalgia for the “old” Australia or skepticism about the new one. It wanders with him, the way memory does: less in a straight line, more in unfinished thoughts and gentle contradictions.

DOGMA is, without question, my favorite Kevin Smith film. I can’t help but be biased, but I feel like the film is nearly perfect in almost every way. The release limbo that the film has been in has caused a ton of chaos in the collector community. The 25th-anniversary 4K UHD release is more than a format upgrade; it’s a reintroduction to a movie that predicted a cultural collision between spirituality and organized extremism long before it defined mainstream discourse. Comedy rarely stays relevant for twenty-five years. This one did because its target isn’t belief—it’s the machinery built around belief and the complacency that follows.

A bachelor party comedy usually starts with the same expectation: chaos, hangovers, bad decisions, and some attempt at clarity before the credits roll. STRIPPER BOYZ takes that blueprint and flips the premise, creating a surprisingly sincere experience without sacrificing the absurdity of watching two lifelong friends attempt to become male revue performers. Stephen brings his best friend Joe to Las Vegas for a bachelor weekend, and instead of hiring entertainment, the two decide they'll be the entertainment. Their mission is framed like a joke, but the film doesn’t treat it as a punchline. The goal is confidence, body positivity, and pushing past the kind of self-doubt that often hides behind humor. The result is a hybrid film that plays like both a narrative buddy comedy and a documentary about pushing beyond your comfort zone.

Most crime stories often live or die by how quickly the filmmaker can establish danger, desire, and motivation. SLOPPY SUNDAY is less concerned with building a sprawling criminal ecosystem than it is with capturing the exact moment a young woman decides she no longer wants to belong to someone else’s version of survival. The film follows Sweetheart, a young sex worker who quits working under her abusive pimp and tries to find a way out of town before she’s dragged back into the same world. The idea is simple, the execution is tight, and the short’s energy comes from watching a character who looks like she could be overpowered at any moment make decisions that flip that assumption on its head.

WITHDRAWAL doesn’t open with the kind of framing that tries to soften addiction into something cinematic. It drops us into the middle of a relationship that had long since become unsustainable, long before either character was ready to admit it. Two young lovers — a singer-songwriter with talent she can’t access and a boyfriend who mistakes loyalty for martyrdom — decide to kick heroin in the most chaotic way possible: alone, together, in a night full of pain they don’t have the tools to process. It’s a terrible plan, but the film understands why it feels like the only option they believe they have left.

WADD: THE LIFE & TIMES OF JOHN C. HOLMES is not a documentary that sits quietly with an expected biography-style dive. It's blunt, direct, and in many ways deliberately unsettling, not because it tries to shock the audience, but because the subject’s life was already a spectacle of extremes. The film isn’t interested in softening Holmes’s story or turning him into a sanitized figure. Instead, it presents a portrait that forces viewers to consider how a reputation becomes a myth, how a person becomes a commodity, and how an era without boundaries creates figures who are never equipped to handle the consequences of their own fame. As a documentary, it functions both as a biography and a time capsule, revealing an industry that was being invented moment by moment, often faster than anyone could comprehend.

HOW TO START A CULT IN 5-EASY STEPS begins with a defeated college graduate examining the world for any sign that adulthood is supposed to feel better than survival. Instead of entering a career, he’s staring down a wall of debt that isn’t an abstract — it’s a direct reminder that he worked this hard and still ended up in the exact position he feared. That frustration becomes the spark for a strange plan: if confidence, charisma, and a pulpit lead to security, then why not build a pulpit of his own?

218 understands that childhood isn’t shaped by what adults say; it’s shaped by everything they refuse to explain. The film makes that idea feel contained to one apartment number, where an eight-year-old boy wakes up to the same unanswered questions every morning. His mother leaves without context. Two officers sit in the living room. The silence is supposed to keep him safe, yet nothing about the situation feels safe to him. The adults may control the problem, but the audience is positioned within the reality of a child abandoned by information.

THE PHANTOM PAIN approaches addiction with a style that mirrors the internal state of its protagonist. Jack has decided to break his pill habit, only to find himself stalked by a voice that insists he isn’t finished with the drugs he’s trying to leave behind. The film uses a literal phone call as the physical manifestation of withdrawal, turning something internal and psychological into an external threat. Rather than lecturing the viewer on the dangers of addiction, it shows how a craving can impersonate reason — how temptation can speak in your own voice.

DON’T MIND ME looks like a story you’ve heard before: siblings reunite in the shadow of a painful past and are forced to confront unresolved history. On paper, the plot moves along the kind of narrative audiences know well. George, a career-focused son who has quietly collapsed under professional expectations, returns to his childhood home. Vanessa, his warm but rebellious sister, refuses to let go of the only space that represents their shared identity. What writer/director Isaiah Hoban Halvorsen does differently, though, is redirect the drama away from transformation and toward something murkier — learning to accept that some distances don’t disappear just because people live in the same space again.

ACRONYMITY begins with an idea that sounds like pure science fiction, but the experience feels closer to a psychological reflection. A man wakes up in a world with no memory and nothing to hold onto except a cryptic acronym — CCNEN — that promises some form of meaning if he can unravel it. The film treats that coded fragment less like a plot device and more like an attempt to anchor identity when everything else goes missing. Where most sci-fi projects use mystery to escalate toward a reveal, this one uses mystery to hold the viewer in a suspended emotional state, inviting them to reflect on the discomfort of not knowing who they are.