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There’s a lightness to an action movie that doesn’t try to desperately convince us it cost ten times as much as it did. KNIGHTFALL has all the recognizable limitations of an indie production, occasionally wears them right on its sleeve, and then gets on with the business of spies, double-crosses, mercenaries, guns, a stolen bio-weapon, and an old house that becomes considerably less peaceful once everyone starts shooting at it. Ben Fortune’s film works best when it embraces that stripped-down identity instead of reaching for a version of James Bond it could never realistically afford.

TEQUILA SUNRISE is almost unfairly appealing, and I mean that beyond having Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Kurt Russell sharing the screen at the height of their movie-star prowess. Conrad Hall photographs Southern California as though every sunset (and sunrise), restaurant window, beach, and late-night street has been waiting specifically for these people to walk through it. There are stretches where the story becomes needlessly difficult to follow, but the movie always knows exactly how it wants to look.

PASSENGER had me more interested in Tyler and Maddie’s van-life experiment than I expected, which is probably why I found myself wishing the movie had spent a little more time making them feel like real people before everything around them went bad. They’ve walked away from New York and the routine of just getting by, trading apartments and stability for a customized van and the promise of seeing where the road takes them. Six weeks later, some of that is already wearing thin, and the small fractures in their relationship give director André Øvredal more interesting ideas to work with than just two disposable characters driving toward an inevitable bad decision.

Vince Vaughn’s Ricky is one of those characters who can make you laugh and want to kick him out of the room at the same time. That reaction isn’t an accident in MADE, because Jon Favreau, seven years before his take on IRON MAN would make him a near-household name, creates almost the entire movie around the exhausting experience of being friends with someone who never knows when to stop talking. Ricky isn’t simply loud or obnoxious; he has a remarkable ability to identify the worst possible thing to say in any situation and then keep going until everyone around him is uncomfortable, angry, or in danger.

At 142 minutes, THE FIX has the odd and unexpected problem of feeling both too packed and too underdeveloped where it matters most. Director/co-writer Guy Moshe has assembled a large group of former CIA operators, a failed mission hanging over them, an excursion into Tehran, a rescue operation, histories for all involved, questions of loyalty, and enough moving parts for a much larger espionage story. The movie is rarely lacking something to do, but all that activity doesn’t automatically give the people carrying it enough depth.

The question behind REANIMATOR ACADEMY isn’t whether it deserves to be rediscovered. It’s how this homemade, knowingly dumb, and completely ’90s video-store era film survived long enough to be rediscovered at all. Visual Vengeance pulling Bret McCormick’s shot-on-video oddity out of obscurity feels less like rescuing some forgotten classic and more like opening a time capsule full of cheap props, terrible jokes, questionable decisions, and people who clearly wanted to make a movie whether they had the resources for it or not.

SORORITY ROW has absolutely no interest in introducing us to sensible people. Ironically, that’s what lets it work. The entire movie depends on a group of college students making one terrible decision after another. Once you accept that these characters are capable of turning an already catastrophic situation into something unimaginably worse, Stewart Hendler’s 2009 slasher becomes a lot easier to enjoy. This came out on the heels of the college slasher-genre reboot craze and added yet another intriguing twist to a genre we thought had run its course.

Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen make LEVITICUS work before the horror really has a chance to. Their chemistry as Naim and Ryan is quiet, awkward, physical, and completely believable, which becomes incredibly important once writer/director Adrian Chiarella starts twisting their attraction into the very thing they’re supposed to fear.

GATOR FACE is covered in sweat, swamp water, rust, blood, and whatever else might be growing in the corners of an abandoned Florida building, with writer/director Padraig Reynolds embracing the kind of physical horror that used to make low-budget genre movies feel dangerous long before everything could be fixed or created digitally. There’s something here, though; some people have mentioned a lack of charm or humor, but I think there’s something important about that. The film isn’t meant to be so bad it’s funny; this is an indie horror that wants to make you feel like you’re there.

MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE has always been easier to admire in pieces than as a complete movie. Nearly forty years later, those pieces are often more interesting than the story holding them together, especially when you can see just how much craftsmanship went into putting Eternia on a movie screen in 1987. There are massive sets, elaborate costumes, incredible makeup work, practical effects, weapons, and a Castle Grayskull that feels like somebody genuinely tried to build the place rather than simply create a backdrop. Whatever else went wrong along the way, this wasn't made without ambition.

There’s a beautiful irony about how little Herbert West learns from his own experience. Corpses can tear through buildings, experiments can end in complete disaster, people can die all around him, and somehow his conclusion is always that the science was still sound. He just needs another opportunity to prove it. Jeffrey Combs understood that so well in BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR that watching West walk toward another terrible idea with absolute confidence becomes half the reason to return.

GRADUATION DAY announces its personality before anyone has even been murdered. Herb Freed cuts the opening track meet into a barrage of runners, screaming spectators, pounding music, stopwatches, and increasingly frantic close-ups as Laura Ramstead pushes herself toward the finish line. She wins the race and promptly dies, establishing both the motive behind everything that follows and the movie's strange fascination with turning athletic competition into something threatening. The editing is excessive, occasionally ridiculous, and immediately more interesting than the straightforward slasher movie that could have been made from the same story.

When you start a horror/comedy, the last thing you’re expecting is solid song, but SWEET MEATS flips that idea on its head. A cannibal horror comedy released by Troma can get away with a lot once the audience understands exactly what kind of movie it is, and musical numbers could easily have been another excuse for intentionally bad jokes. Writer/director/star Ricky Glore goes in the opposite direction. The lyrics are ridiculous when they need to be, but there’s enough genuine effort behind the music that some of these songs stick around after the blood and body parts have been forgotten.

Clara has a magnificent voice long before she considers becoming a singer. She uses it while accompanying her adoptive mother, Ana, to births in their Quechua community high in the Bolivian Andes, singing songs passed down from one generation to the next as women bring children into the world. THE CONDOR DAUGHTER understands the importance of that. Clara isn't discovering something that was missing from her life. She's beginning to imagine that something she already had might actually mean something more.

THIS IS BUZZ is at its best when it stops explaining how important BUZZ was and simply lets us see the thing. Clips from Mark Pellington and Jon Klein's short-lived 1990 MTV series arrive in bursts of voices, graphics, street footage, cultural commentary, music, political ideas, and images that barely wait for the viewer to catch up. After thirty-six years of increasingly compressed media, the strange part isn't that BUZZ now looks dated. It's how familiar its method of throwing the world at us all at once has become.

For much of MARSHMALLOW, I kept wondering how much of its familiar summer-camp horror language was deliberate. Camp Almar has the campfire story, the kids testing one another, the intimidating woods, the counselors who may know more than they’re saying, and the possibility that something dangerous is waiting outside the cabins. Daniel DelPurgatorio knows exactly what those pieces suggest, though, and his feature debut gradually makes it clear that simply delivering another variation on a camp slasher was never the goal. There’s a much stranger movie hiding inside this one, and my biggest frustration is that I wanted considerably more time with it.

Hiroyuki Sanada spends much of ROARING FIRE surrounded by a movie that refuses to behave itself. He's introduced as a Texas-raised rancher, sent to Japan by a family revelation, drawn into a murder mystery, surrounded by criminals, reunited with relatives he never knew existed, and eventually entangled in a scheme involving a massive diamond. Norifumi Suzuki keeps throwing more at him, frequently with little concern for whether the latest addition belongs in the same movie as the previous one. Sanada's ability to move through it all without losing his footing is a large part of why this strange action comedy works.

Some people enter a room knowing exactly where they belong. Isabel usually looks like she's still waiting for someone to tell her where to stand, and ON A STRING gets a remarkable amount of comedy from that uncertainty. Isabel Hagen doesn't exaggerate the discomfort or build every interaction toward an obvious punchline. She lets people talk a little too long, misunderstand each other, cross boundaries without realizing it, and leave Isabel trying to decide what exactly just happened.

There are stretches of GUYVER: DARK HERO where its budget is impossible to ignore, and then somebody puts on one of those creature suits and starts throwing punches. Suddenly, none of that matters nearly as much. Steve Wang understood that the Guyver wouldn't be sold through expensive sets or elaborate visual effects. It needed creatures that could move, performers who could fight inside them, and a camera willing to stay close enough for us to appreciate what they were doing. More than thirty years later, that remains the strongest argument for the film.

The first thing I noticed about FILIPIÑANA was how physically hot it feels. Rafael Manuel lets the sun, the cicadas, the sprinklers, and the long stretches of inactivity settle over the movie until the country club starts to feel almost narcotic. Everyone moves as though the heat has slowed the entire property down, even as workers continue trimming, cleaning, serving, carrying, and maintaining an environment designed for people who barely have to lift a finger. It’s a slow movie, sometimes almost aggressively so, and I can understand why that approach will test some viewers. For me, patience pays off more often than it frustrates, because lethargy is part of what Manuel is examining.

Rima Te Wiata isn’t in HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE for nearly as long as Sam Neill or Julian Dennison, but the entire movie depends on what Bella establishes early on. Ricky Baker arrives at another foster home expecting the same thing he has apparently learned to expect everywhere else. Adults already have an opinion of him; he’ll eventually disappoint them, and whatever temporary arrangement has been made will fall apart. Bella refuses to participate in that cycle. She feeds him, jokes with him, gives him a dog, and doesn’t treat every display of attitude as evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with him. The kindness is so uncomplicated that Ricky doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

The most effective parts of FALL 2: DEADPOINT are the moments when Michael and Peter Spierig simply let the height register, a foot searches for somewhere safe to land. Loose material disappears over an edge. The camera looks down long enough for the distance to stop being an abstraction. You understand exactly where these people are, how little space they have to work with, and what one bad movement would mean. The original FALL figured out that a survival thriller like this doesn’t need much once it convinces you the drop is real. The sequel remembers that lesson.

The new Synapse Films Blu-ray makes T.A.G.: THE ASSASSINATION GAME feel like exactly the kind of 1980s movie that should have developed a much larger cult following. It has a great premise, a cast filled with actors who were still a few years away from becoming much more recognizable, and Nick Castle directing his first feature after already having one of the strangest résumés in Hollywood. There’s also something difficult to categorize about the finished movie. It isn’t really a slasher, doesn’t commit fully to being a comedy, periodically flirts with film noir, and spends a surprising amount of time as a college romance. That combination is both the reason it remains interesting and the reason it never completely comes together.

I think what surprised me the most with this rewatching of STRICTLY BALLROOM is how much of Baz Luhrmann is already there. This was his first feature, made years before ROMEO + JULIET, MOULIN ROUGE!, and ELVIS, the enormous productions that would eventually become synonymous with his name. There’s no mistaking who directed this, though. The colors are vibrant, the performances push beyond realism, the camera moves with the same enthusiasm, and everyone seems to exist in a world where emotions deserve an extraordinary presentation. The difference is scale. Luhrmann had far fewer toys at his disposal, and that limitation may be one reason STRICTLY BALLROOM remains one of his most endearing films. There’s something genuinely scrappy underneath all the sequins, and this 4K makes them all shine!

James Ross II spends some of PARASOMNIA’s best moments watching Riley prepare to sleep. There’s an anxiety to the process because bedtime isn’t an ordinary part of her day. It’s something she has to manage. Jasmine Mathews plays those routines with the weariness of someone who has been dealing with the same problem for years, and the movie understands that something is frightening about needing a strategy for an act the body eventually demands anyway. Riley can postpone sleep, prepare for it, and convince herself that tonight might be different. Eventually, she still has to close her eyes.