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WE ARE ALIENS moves with the patience of memory itself. Not filmmaking memory, where every moment arrives on queue and heightened, but actual memory, fragmented, uneven, specific, and often tied to feelings that become harder to explain with age. Kohei Kadowaki’s film understands how childhood relationships can shape the architecture of an entire life, even when those relationships eventually disappear into distance and silence.

There’s a difference between someone just telling jokes and someone unloading years of perspective that’s funny, because it happened for real. LISA ANN WALTER: IT WAS AN ACCIDENT sits in that second category, and that shapes the entire experience. This doesn’t feel like a carefully polished production with a comedian stepping into the spotlight. It feels like someone who’s been doing this for decades, getting the space to say everything she’s been holding onto without needing to sand off the edges.

Trying to bring something this iconic back without overthinking it sounds simple, but it rarely is. Most revivals either chase the relevance that made the original great or get stuck honoring the past so rigidly that they forget to entertain. What this series does differently is sidestep both traps. It doesn’t try to modernize the characters in any meaningful way, and it doesn’t pretend it can recreate the exact conditions that made the originals untouchable. It just gets to work.

This story does something that I haven’t seen often, a unique exploration that begins from a place of displacement, with a man already disconnected from everything that once defined him. By the time he reaches Vichy, the collapse has already happened. What follows isn’t about whether he’ll fall further, but how far he’s willing to reshape himself to avoid acknowledging what he’s become.

What happens after the story everyone already knows ends? That’s the question sitting at the center of CHE GUEVARA: THE LAST COMPANIONS, and it’s one the film approaches with a clear understanding that the answer won’t be what you’ve set yourself to expect. The revolution has already been immortalized, simplified, and repurposed across decades. What remains here are the fragments left behind, carried by the people who had to keep moving when the symbol they followed fell.

There’s a stillness that defines THE STATION, but it’s not the kind that brings comfort. It’s the kind that feels earned through exhaustion, where every rule in place exists because something worse has already happened. The film doesn’t explain that history directly, because it doesn’t need to do so. You feel it in the structure of the space, in the way people move through it, and in the unspoken understanding that this fragile sense of order could collapse at any moment.

BLAISE doesn’t start with a big moment or a clear turning point. It starts with someone who’s gotten so used to saying yes that it barely registers anymore. That pattern isn’t framed as a flaw right away; it’s just how he is, keeping things easy, keeping things quiet. The shift comes later, and when it does, it doesn’t feel like growth at first. It feels like a disruption.

There’s a clear sincerity running through THE MIDWAY POINT, and it shows up almost immediately. Not in the way scenes are constructed or how the story unfolds, but in the feeling that this is coming from a very specific place in writer/director Lucca Vieira’s heart and mind. It doesn’t feel manufactured or overly cultivated.

There’s no easing into a story like CRADLE OF FEAR. It doesn’t conventionally build atmosphere or slowly guide you into its world. It drops you straight into something abrasive, something that feels more like it’s daring you to keep watching than trying to win you over. That approach defines the entire experience. If it connects, it’s because you meet it on its terms. If it doesn’t, it pushes you away almost immediately.

GIRLS presents itself as a snapshot of youth in transition, a variation on the traditional coming-of-age story, but it never quite decides how closely it wants to observe that moment or what it wants to say about it once it does. The film follows a group of young women stepping out of adolescence and into a version of adulthood that feels both exhilarating and unstable. Yet, instead of building that journey into a single, solid vision, it drifts through it with a looseness that becomes harder to ignore the longer it goes on.

G.I. SAMURAI offers up an idea that’s more than a little compelling, so it almost feels like the film doesn’t need to do much more to win you over. A “modern” military unit dropped into feudal Japan, armed with tanks, machine guns, and helicopters, facing off against swords and arrows. This is the kind of concept that sells itself. The film understands that appeal, leans into it, and then reveals that it’s aiming for something more complicated than simply staging that clash.

There’s a version of BLUE THUNDER that would play out like pure adrenaline, built on rotor blades, gunfire, and stunt work that doesn’t exist anymore. But there’s another version running underneath it, one that’s more interested in control, surveillance, and the idea that the tools meant to protect people can just as easily turn on them. The film never commits to that second version, but it’s there, and it’s what keeps this from fading into the background of 80s action.

There’s no mystery about what THE INVINCIBLE EIGHT is trying to do. It’s built on revenge, stacked with recognizable names, and structured to deliver one fight after another. What makes it so interesting isn’t the setup; it’s watching a young studio test how far it can push a formula that already worked for someone else.

Two people, one location, and a relationship already under strain. MAGIC HOUR keeps its setup simple, almost to a fault, dropping Erin and Charlie into the desert with the expectation that everything unresolved between them will rise to the surface. It’s an intimate framework that should be filled with tension, but the film spends more time circling its ideas than digging into them.

Eight episodes, thirty minutes each, and not a single second drags. ALL IN moves fast, but it never feels rushed, which is a harder balance to pull off than it looks. ALL IN builds its entire identity around that idea, and it’s what keeps the series from feeling like just another inspirational sports documentary. Tyler Turner isn’t chasing validation here. He’s chasing something unfamiliar, and that makes all the difference.