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Larry the Cable Guy has built a career on the unlikely marriage of down-home humor and edgy but warm comedy, and his latest stand-up special proves he hasn’t lost the knack. Filmed at Florida’s historic Capitol Theater, IT’S A GIFT finds him returning to the stage with the same everyman persona that first made him a household name. While some comedians reinvent themselves with every outing, Larry leans into consistency—his voice, both literal and comedic, remains as unmistakable as ever.

DAKOTA is a film defined by obsession—both in the story it tells and the story behind its making. At its center is Dick de Boer, played with conviction by Kees Brusse, a Dutch pilot whose life is tethered to his DC-3 Dakota. For Dick, flying isn’t just an occupation; it’s survival, compulsion, and the only place he seems to feel alive. That singular fixation gives the movie its shape, even when production chaos nearly brought it to a halt.

Few trilogies define a filmmaker’s voice as directly as Nicolas Winding Refn’s PUSHER films. Spanning a decade, these three entries chart Copenhagen’s criminal underworld from shifting perspectives: the hustler scrambling for survival, the screw-up desperate for respect, and the kingpin watching his empire crumble. Each film stands alone, but together they paint a panorama of power, desperation, and inevitability that lingers long after the credits roll.

Now and then, a film comes along that isn’t defined by its creature design, its chase sequences, or even its premise, but instead by the performance at its center. XENO is one of those films. For all its polish and high-concept pitch, what ultimately makes the movie land is Lulu Wilson. She anchors the story with a performance that radiates both heart and grit, carrying every scene with a natural presence.

History rarely gives us clean accounts. Some moments are captured in countless reels of film, studied and revisited until they become cultural touchstones. Others slip into silence, either ignored, erased, or deemed too dangerous to remember. NI-NAADAMAADIZ: RED POWER RISING faces that silence head-on, reconstructing a 1974 Indigenous youth-led occupation in Kenora, Ontario, from just eight surviving minutes of archival footage. What could have been another forgotten protest instead becomes a vivid retelling, crafted with purpose by director Shane Belcourt and journalist-producer Tanya Talaga.

HELLBENDER is the rare micro-budget indie that treats constraint as an invitation. What begins as a portrait of a teen and her mother making loud, messy music in the woods steadily reveals itself as a story about inheritance—what we protect our kids from, what we pass down anyway, and the dangerous thrill of figuring out who you are when every rule you’ve been given stops making sense. The Adams family—John, Toby Poser, and daughters Zelda and Lulu—built a world with their own hands, and the film is strongest exactly where that do-it-yourself confidence and intimacy are allowed to run wild.

This film does something unique, shining a spotlight on Bunny Yeager—model, photographer, entrepreneur—whose fingerprints are all over mid-century American pop culture even if her name isn’t. Rather than building a biography, the documentary assembles a persuasive, steadily layered case: Yeager’s images didn’t just decorate the era; they helped to create it. The work popularized the bikini and elevated the image of Bettie Page. It molded the 1950s pin-up into something both sharper, nudging a country inching toward social change to confront who controls the image of women and why.

In just nineteen minutes, RIPE achieves what many features spend an hour or two chasing: a world thick with history and spiritual resonance. Writer-director Solara Thanh Bình Đặng roots the film in the Mekong Delta, an ecological crossroads where fertility and precarity intertwine. The story follows a young woman faced with a decision that has shaped generations before her—whether to accept an arranged marriage for the sake of her family’s farm. What could read as a familiar coming-of-age negotiation is refracted through a lens, where the land itself and unseen forces press against her choice.

There’s an instant warmth to this kind of studio-era comedy: a family tossed into gentle disorder, a front door that never stops opening, and a romance that blooms because everyone tries to do the right thing at the wrong time. DEAR RUTH is built on a premise with generous payoffs. A teenage idealist has been writing morale-boosting letters to a soldier overseas and signing them with her older sister’s name. When the soldier shows up on leave expecting to meet his sweetheart, the household scrambles to sustain the illusion, protect the sister’s very real engagement, and keep Sunday dinner from curdling into scandal.

Christopher Leone’s CODE 3 aims for something trickier than a straight “one wild night” rollick: it wants to show the volatility, indignity, and strange tenderness of EMS work without sanding off the splinters. The movie follows Randy (Rainn Wilson), a paramedic who’s done—done with panic attacks, done with a system that bleeds him dry, done with the endless triage of other people’s worst days. He’s training his replacement, Jessica (Aimee Carrero), over a single 24-hour shift, while his partner Mike (Lil Rel Howery) keeps the unit stitched together with wisdom and bone-dry asides. The premise is familiar—one last ride—but the execution is keyed to lived-in specifics, the kind of details you don’t get unless someone has lived that life.

THE QUIREBOYS – LIVE AT ROCKPALAST is less a live album and more a time capsule. Split across two concerts—one from 1990 at Cologne’s Live Music Hall and another from 2007 at Bonn’s Crossroads Festival—the release captures not just a band but an entire attitude that defined British sleaze rock. By presenting both eras back-to-back, the package highlights the hunger of a band still climbing and the seasoned grit of musicians who had weathered the ups and downs of two decades in the industry.

Venice has always been a city of contradictions, a place where opulent façades conceal elaborate secrets. It feels fitting then that Ilya Khrzhanovsky brought his sprawling, controversial DAU project here under the banner of The Quantum Effect. Staged at the San Marco Art Center, the exhibition reframes the long-mythologized DAU experiment by presenting unseen “physics” reels—documented debates between real scientists dropped into meticulously recreated conditions of Lev Landau’s Soviet laboratory—while pairing them with restored screenings of three completed works: FOUR, DAU. NATASHA, and DAU. DEGENERATION.

At first glance, BAND ON THE RUN looks like a straightforward indie road movie: a band chasing a shot at South by Southwest, a van full of tension, and the promise of a rival group waiting to clash along the way. But what gives the film its shape isn’t just the music or the road-trip formula. It’s the story of a chronically ill father insisting on being part of the ride and his son, who struggles to balance his obligations with his ambitions. That generational conflict, set against the very specific backdrop of Detroit’s late-90s garage rock revival, makes the film more than just a string of tour-bus anecdotes.

Valentyn Vasyanovych has built his reputation on quiet yet devastating portraits of Ukraine in crisis, from the haunting near-future visions of ATLANTIS to the clinical, unflinching gaze of REFLECTION. With TO THE VICTORY! he continues this trajectory, shifting from war itself to the space after it ends. The result is a film that resists pride, lingering instead on the emptiness that follows survival.

Directed by Anthony D’Ambrosio and shot on location in Poland, the film dramatizes the true story of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Catholic priest who volunteered to take the place of another man condemned to die in Auschwitz in 1941. While Kolbe’s sacrifice has long been told, the film expands the story, exploring the nine companions with whom he shared a cell and the fragile bonds forged in the most harrowing circumstances.