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The least frightening thing about the Ice Cream Man is how he looks. Ari Millen’s vendor arrives in Bayleen Bay wearing his uniform, a narrow mustache, and the welcoming smile of someone trusted to park beside playgrounds. Nothing about him screams out panic. He simply waits for the children to approach, hands them something sweet, and watches them walk away with the satisfaction of a man convinced he has made their day better. The horror begins after they finish eating.

Peco walks into every room as though the applause has just been delayed, not denied. He boasts about becoming the greatest table-tennis player in the world, hustles weaker opponents for money, and treats practice as something reserved for people with less natural ability. His confidence would be insufferable if Yōsuke Kubozuka didn’t make it so entertaining. Peco isn’t merely convinced that he’s a hero. He has built his entire identity around the assumption that everyone else will eventually recognize it.

A wagon filled with cookies may look like a symbol of childhood initiative, but director Alysa Nahmias understands how quickly a sales goal can turn excitement into pressure. COOKIE QUEENS spends a Girl Scout Cookie season following four girls whose ambitions range from modest to staggering, revealing a tradition where confidence, family pride, community, competition, and commerce are packed together as tightly as the cases of cookies filling their homes.

Before the killer rises from the lake, the merchandise has already built a mythology around the corpse. VHS boxes, action figures, board games, posters, sequels, and increasingly desperate attempts to keep the Camp Miasma name alive pass before us as evidence of a franchise that has been exploited far beyond its natural lifespan. Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun understands that horror fans don’t merely remember movies. We remember how they were packaged, where we found them, what the cover promised, and the private meanings we attached to something dismissed by everyone else as disposable.

The alien spacecraft in HYPERSPACE was reportedly a six-by-five-foot miniature that weighed roughly 600 pounds and cost only $650 to build in the early 1980s. That improbable combination of thrift and nerve may be the most accurate possible description of the movie surrounding it. Todd Durham’s science-fiction comedy carries the ambition of something colossal while being held together by whatever money, materials, locations, and willing participants happened to be available in Shelby, North Carolina.

A missing cat receives more attention than the collapse of civilization. That imbalance makes perfect sense in PORTRAITS OF THE APOCALYPSE, where people remain preoccupied with private lives, family struggles, and unresolved grief even after the dead begin walking through Buenos Aires. The world may be ending, but someone still wants to finish an argument, conceal an error, or get a few hours of sleep.

Hearing loss can make someone responsible for solving communication problems that everyone else helped create. A missed word becomes their mistake. A conversation held over background noise becomes their failure to keep up. Asking someone to repeat themselves risks annoyance, while pretending to understand can leave them isolated inside a room full of people. HEARD examines that calculation through individuals who’ve spent much of their lives adjusting themselves to environments that rarely consider meeting them in the middle.

The adults in this film keep leaving rooms moments before they might notice something they should. They’re away at sea, lost in their own desires, distracted by grief, dulled by addiction, or protected by positions that keep anyone from questioning them. Children disappear while the village continues along with its normal routine. Robert Sigl’s film understands that childhood can be frightening without the supernatural because children are often expected to survive situations that the adults around them have chosen not to see.

An indicator light keeps blinking beside a dying man, repeating its empty warning while his mind struggles to explain how he reached the floor of an underground parking garage. Romolo Guerrieri doesn’t treat the gunshot as the beginning of an investigation. It’s the endpoint of a life already distorted by jealousy, sexual frustration, and a man’s belief that every person around him exists in relation to his desires. THE DOUBLE moves backward from death, although its memories refuse to line up in a way to provide a dependable account of what happened.

One fighter stands, another falls, and the bell appears to be the answer to everything. Director/co-writer Shūji Terayama looks past that temporary certainty in THE BOXER, finding an entire society of damaged men whose victories disappear almost as quickly as the swelling around their eyes. The film follows the familiar outline of a retired champion training an unlikely contender, then covers that outline in grief, resentment, theatricality, and the knowledge that courage won’t repair every part of a life.

The setting is ridiculous, the fistfights in empty swimming pools, the crowd being oddly dressed, and Jean-Claude Van Damme entering the space with complete physical confidence. Sheldon Lettich understands that an underground-fighting movie needs more than a procession of bodies collapsing in the same warehouse. Each confrontation gets its own environment, mood, and small dose of spectacle, giving a familiar formula enough variety to keep moving.

Sex has become so scarce, or in some cases even taboo, in mainstream movies that showing adults openly wanting it now feels strangely confrontational. Gregg Araki responds to that with I WANT YOUR SEX. This loud, latex-covered comedy treats desire as funny, dangerous, embarrassing, liberating, and occasionally capable of ruining everyone’s week. Ultimately, I do think there could have been a more edgy version of this film somewhere; it played with that line, but never quite jumped to the other side as much as it could have.

Disco reached North London with fewer resources, more rain, and little hope of resembling the fantasy sold by the movies it wanted to recreate. THE MUSIC MACHINE responds by placing its glitter above unemployed young adults, cramped flats, cheap drinks, and people who view one dance competition as a possible route toward a different life. The result is neither a convincing musical drama nor an outright failure. It’s a frequently clumsy production whose limitations preserve something far more interesting than the story it was trying to tell.

The camera doesn’t observe Anthony’s transformation so much as become part of the experience alongside it. Metal scrapes, bodies twitch, voices become swallowed by noise, and the image repeatedly threatens to come apart before the character does. TETSUO: THE BULLET MAN is an exhausting 71 minutes by design, though Shinya Tsukamoto’s commitment to sensory punishment becomes both its greatest strength and its most persistent obstacle.

Most of the adults in YOUNG MOTHERS don’t press on with speeches about saving anyone. They prepare bottles, arrange appointments, ask difficult questions, and remain nearby when the answers fall apart. Their work rarely looks dramatic, but Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne understand that dependable care can feel almost radical to someone who has spent her life expecting abandonment.

A necklace of grinning skulls hangs across Zou Qi’s chest, and every one of them is hungry. The image is strange, theatrical, faintly ridiculous, and genuinely threatening at the same time. That combination defines THE NINE DEMONS, a martial arts fantasy that keeps adding blood, colored lights, supernatural children, flying props, and elaborate combat until its modest production can barely contain it.

At this point in reviewing films, it’s not often that I take it upon myself to just watch something that’s already been released, just out there! I recently saw Givan Onuaguluchi-May’s social media push and was instantly pulled into this project. Opening the front door to a stranger is one of those decisions that only feels dangerous after something has gone wrong. LIFE INSURANCE understands how much tension can be pulled from that small act. The short doesn’t need an isolated cabin or some elaborate mythology. It starts with a woman trying to enjoy a quiet meal and two visitors who know how to turn courtesy into access.

THREADS begins its march toward extinction in Iran. Watching it in July 2026, while America is actively bombing Iran, transforms what once appeared to be Cold War background noise into the most unnerving part of the film. Director Mick Jackson doesn’t initially announce that Iran will become the point from which civilization unravels. The crisis enters through car radios, television reports, newspaper headlines, and conversations that receive only partial attention. Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher) and Jimmy Kemp (Reece Dinsdale) have more immediate concerns. Ruth is pregnant, their families need to meet, a wedding is expected, and neither of them appears prepared for the life taking shape around them.

The most difficult constitutional principles are rarely tested by people we find admirable. They’re tested by figures like Larry Flynt, provocateurs whose conduct can be repellent even when the rights they defend are essential. Miloš Forman’s 1996 biopic understands that contradiction and builds around it, asking whether freedom still means anything when its protections must extend to someone many would rather condemn. Where the film compromises is in making Flynt easier to digest and defend than the real man likely was, softening his cruelties so the principle can stand apart from the person. Thirty years later, that feels even more urgent. In an era increasingly comfortable with deciding that certain voices are too offensive, dangerous, or undeserving to protect, the film’s warning carries greater weight than it did upon release.

I knew the twist, but somehow, 50-plus years after its release, I was still surprised watching this for the first time. Everyone in SOYLENT GREEN looks exhausted, and one bad conflict away from collapse. Detective Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) pushes through packed stairwells where unhoused residents sleep on landings, enters rooms that offer no relief from the heat, and treats running water as a luxury worth stealing. Director Richard Fleischer doesn’t need towering machines or elaborate futuristic skylines to establish that civilization has failed. He lets the sweat do it.

CAPPS CROSSING: WRONG SIDE OF DEAD keeps changing its mind about the type of danger living in the woods. It begins as a straightforward backwoods slasher, shifts toward a mystery involving old murders, introduces a leading lady trained to study criminal behavior, and eventually twists nearly everything we’ve been told. That restlessness occasionally yields a pleasant surprise, but it also leaves the movie at odds with its own most effective qualities.

DVD menus once made a movie feel larger than the movie itself. Commentary tracks, deleted scenes, production diaries, hidden Easter eggs, and animated menus offered several more hours inside a world that could’ve ended with the credits (it's irritating, because Blu-ray did away with a lot of this, then 4K really put the nail in the coffin, which is wild since those formats have more space.) DEAD MEDIA remembers that experience with affection, although writer and director Joseph Scrimshaw is just as interested in the people who never learned when to eject the disc.

I loved HATCHING, Hanna Bergholm’s first feature, which makes NIGHTBORN feel more like a frustration than a simple disappointment. Hanna Bergholm’s previous film took body horror, family pressures, childhood anxiety, and creature-feature eccentricity and shaped them into something strange without feeling hollow. It had a real emotional connection under the grotesque imagery, and even when it went big, it still felt connected to the pain it was trying to explore. NIGHTBORN has that same ambition. It has a lot of the same strengths, too. What it doesn’t have is the restraint needed to keep its own discomfort from becoming unbearable.

THE WAR GAME is only 48 minutes long, which almost feels wrong after watching it. Not because it needs to be longer, but because Peter Watkins packs so much institutional failure, terror, and moral collapse into less than an hour that the runtime starts to feel like part of the accusation. Nuclear war doesn’t need a three-act structure. It needs minutes, impact, panic, and people realizing far too late that the rules they were handed were written for a fantasy.

Few movie trends burned brighter or expired faster than the rush to imitate SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. Once John Travolta’s white suit, dance-floor antics, and working-class frustration became an international phenomenon, filmmakers around the world scrambled to capture some part of it. Italian producers moved quickly, turning disco into its own subgenre filled with ambitious young men, romantic problems, spectacular clothing, and enough dancing to cover almost any hole in the screenplay.