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QUEENS OF THE DEAD is a battle staged on a dance floor, where identity, community, and performance are all turned up to eleven. Tina Romero positions the film inside a Brooklyn warehouse party, then detonates it with a zombie surge that scrambles drag rivalries, backstage politics, and romantic hang-ups into a makeshift survival crew. That hook alone would be enough to carry a standard horror-comedy, but the surprise is how much sincerity lives under the glitter. Even when jokes land wide and the gore is a bit laughable, the movie keeps circling back to what matters: chosen family and the work it takes to remain one when everything outside is trying to split you apart.

A classified Cold War experiment. A radio call from a father lost in time—a mom who decides to chase the impossible. PROJECT GENESIS doesn’t start small, and it refuses to play small once it gets moving. Writer/director Chookiat Sakveerakul swings for the fences with a genre cocktail that laces time-travel sci-fi with kaiju flourishes, prehistoric spectacle, dystopian futures, and a mother-daughter story sturdy enough to steady the camera when the movie’s imagination threatens to buckle it. Ambition is the point here—ambition of scope, of timeline, of texture—and the film largely earns the right to be big by keeping its human center in focus.

SCHOOL IN THE CROSSHAIRS works because it takes a simple idea—a teen girl discovers her telekinetic powers—and refuses to treat it as a party trick. Yuka (Hiroko Yakushimaru) is a kid who suddenly has a lever big enough to move her world, and director Nobuhiko Obayashi uses that lever to pry open everything around her: the pressure to conform, the seduction of authority, the way adults and institutions look at students and see raw material. Even when the film gets strange—cosmic intruders, pop-art—it stays grounded in the daily reality of school life: classrooms, clubs, elections, crushes. Ordinary rituals pushed slightly off-axis until they reveal what they were training you for all along.

ANNE RICE’S TALAMASCA: THE SECRET ORDER shows up with an unusual mission: to expand Rice’s Immortal Universe beyond its familiar bloodlines and covens, into the minds of those who’ve spent centuries watching from the shadows. It’s part gothic mystery, part supernatural espionage thriller — and against all odds, it mostly works. This six-episode series finds a balance between character-driven tension and world-expanding spectacle, creating something that feels both familiar and new around every corner.

TENEMENT starts with a moment: a Japanese-Cambodian manga artist flies to Phnom Penh after her mother’s death to reconnect with family and, hopefully, with a part of herself that distance turned abstract. She rents an apartment in a crumbling housing block once filled with memories her mother never fully shared. Relatives welcome her, neighbors are intrigued, and this old apartment seems eager to help the healing process along. Then the walls begin to talk—just not in a language that comfort understands.

SOMEONE DIES! is proof that lo-fi sci-fi can still feel fresh when it leads with personality. Set almost entirely inside a creaky Houston apartment, the film builds a butterfly-effect satire out of a desperate dad, an ominous letter, and a time-warping contraption that looks like it was assembled during a garage-sale speed run. It’s proudly rough around the edges by design, and that handmade quality becomes part of the joke. When characters insist the device is “teleportery, witchcrafty,” you believe them because the film’s world embraces the ridiculous without apology.

LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER arrives with a reputation larger than its running time. As the first (of many) feature adaptations of D.H. Lawrence’s legendary novel, this 1955 version wears its history in every frame: a French production translating a very English scandal, built in the language of a studio romance rather than raw transgression. Seen today, it fascinates less as provocation and more as a window into mid-century decorum, the careful ways filmmakers worked around censors, and how a love story about class and the body could be shaped into something both daring for its moment and undeniably acceptable.

Reza Dahya’s BOXCUTTER runs, breathes, and sweats through the city it calls home. Toronto isn’t a backdrop here; it’s the film’s heartbeat, the constant that is pushing its characters to chase validation, redemption, and maybe even a version of success that feels like theirs. An aspiring rapper named Rome loses the only copy of his music hours before a chance encounter with a superstar producer. The film handles this moment with a deeper dive than expected, allowing it to become a study of insecurity, identity, and the desperate hunger for recognition in a city that’s still fighting to be seen.

THIS TOO SHALL PASS lives in that liminal stretch between what teenagers swear they’re ready for and what adulthood actually demands. Set to a distinctly 80s pulse, it follows 16-year-old Simon and his close friends as they sprint toward the Canadian border for a taste of freedom, expecting a postcard of rebellion and getting a messier, more genuine weekend instead. The hook is familiar: a road trip that doubles as a reckoning. What elevates it is how rarely the film settles for an easy out. It lets immaturity be loud, friendship be complicated, and consequences arrive without preaching. For a film packaging its nostalgia in hooky, mixtape-ready textures (with all the cliches in tow), it’s surprisingly honest about how much growing up hurts.

It’s almost impressive how The Salem Chronicles manages to take a premise that should write itself—a detective uncovering his family’s cursed bloodline in the most haunted town in America—and yet makes it feel like punishment. Not the “fun” kind of punishment. The cinematic equivalent of being stuck in traffic while someone lectures you about the power of cinema. Thomas J. Churchill once again proves that quantity does not equal quality. The man pumps out films faster than most people change their underwear.

IN OUR BLOOD is the kind of horror-adjacent thriller that creeps up on you while insisting it’s only documenting what’s already there. Framed through a documentary style lens—literally, via a cinematographer’s camera and a filmmaker’s phone—the story follows Emily, a director attempting to reconcile with her estranged mother while shooting the process. When the mother vanishes, the film pivots from intimate vérité to a progressively unnerving investigation, testing how far film-making can go before it becomes complicity. The premise isn’t just clever; it weaponizes point of view to turn everyday coverage into an ethical minefield.

BAD BOY opens with the echoes of Britain’s largest cash robbery, the infamous 2006 Securitas heist. But instead of glorifying the crime or fetishizing the chaos, the film takes a humanistic detour—centering not on the criminals themselves, but on one man forever caught in their shadow. Jeremy “Bad Boy” Bailey, an MMA fighter once accused and later cleared of involvement, serves as the focal point for Terry Stone and Richard Turner’s latest documentary, which explores how public perception can outlast even the harshest legal verdicts.

THE JEWISH NAZI? begins with an image so unsettling it almost feels like a deception: a boy in a Nazi uniform, arm raised in salute, eyes wide with confusion. That image—both horrifying and heartbreaking—anchors this powerful documentary from Australian filmmaker Dan Goldberg. The story it tells, of Alex Kurzem, a Jewish child who survived the Holocaust by posing as “Hitler’s youngest soldier,” isn’t just one of history’s strangest footnotes. It’s a meditation on survival, memory, and the blurred boundaries between truth and self-preservation.

TEARS BURN TO ASH is more like a dream caught in the in-between—a story that exists in the hours before dawn, when grief and identity intertwine. Natalie Murao’s fifteen-minute short is an intimate portrayal of a Japanese Canadian woman navigating loss while confronting the cultural fracture of her own reflection. It’s a film that doesn’t just explore displacement; it embodies it.

LOST WAX begins with silence—the kind that comes after something has vanished and the world doesn’t yet realize it’s missing. A girl disappears from her apartment complex, and the only person who truly grieves for her is Osas, a “stranger” who barely knew her. What follows is a tender and haunting reflection on empathy, displacement, and the fragile ways human beings find to mourn one another.