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A family can teach a child who they are without ever sitting them down and trying to explain it. THE THREAD explores that idea in glances, corrections, routines, mirrors, hair, skin, music, and the small adjustments children make before they can even pretend to understand why. Writer/director Fenn O’Meally’s short doesn’t charge into those ideas with a heavy hand. It watches a household, lets discomfort pass through ordinary moments, and trusts that growing up between cultures can be felt long before it’s spoken.

Mary Oliver built an enormous following by asking people to stop, look, listen, and mean it. That sounds pretty clear until you consider how much noise most of us drag through a day. MARY OLIVER: SAVED BY THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD understands that Oliver’s legacy can’t be reduced to a simplified quation. Sasha Waters’ documentary approaches her as a working poet, a private queer woman, a disciplined observer, and someone whose poems reached people who might never otherwise describe themselves as poetry readers.

A show built on grunts, screams, roars, blood, and silence has no business being this deep or emotionally intense, but GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY’S PRIMAL has spent three seasons making that contradiction feel like it fits. The third season comes after an ending that seemed to close Spear’s story with enough finality to leave the series in a difficult position. Bringing him back could have felt like a desperate reversal that weakens what came before. Instead, the season turns resurrection into a wound that won’t stop opening. I didn’t know what to expect, and the season blew all of those thoughts away.

BADLAND takes nearly three hours to make a person sit with a man who has already crossed a line most stories would treat as the point of no return. Francesco Lucente’s film isn’t interested in making Jerry Rice easy to forgive, and it’s not built around the release of watching violence turn into spectacle. Its challenge lies in staying close to someone whose damage has curdled into something monstrous, while refusing to pretend that the horror began only after he returned home.

THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL has the confidence of a thriller and the blood of something stranger. It walks into the room wearing prestigious clothing, carrying the names of Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier, James Mason, Franklin J. Schaffner, Ira Levin, and Jerry Goldsmith, then reveals that its real interest lies closer to conspiracy, nightmares, and speculative horror. That tension between presentation and imagination is what keeps the film alive nearly five decades later. It’s too odd to be treated as a simple era thriller, too controlled to dismiss as pure exploitation, and too focused to let its wildest ideas collapse into cheap sensationalism.

Death has terrible timing in LIFE GOES ON. Bill is ready for it, maybe even eager for it, but the universe keeps hitting reset like someone is playing a twisted game. That could turn grim fast, and in a lesser short, the setup might have leaned too hard into either darker humor or sentimentality. Writers/directors Daniel Audritt and Kat Butterfield take the stranger route by making the repetition funny first, sad second, and healing by the time it’s over.

ESCAPE TO ATHENA has the sunny, overstuffed personality of a movie that knows half its appeal is watching famous faces wander through wartime Greece with explosives nearby. Roger Moore as a morally flexible Austrian officer, Telly Savalas as a resistance leader, David Niven as an archaeology professor, Elliott Gould as a captured entertainer, Claudia Cardinale as a brothel madam with political ties, Richard Roundtree in soldier mode, Stefanie Powers brings old-Hollywood showmanship, and Sonny Bono as an Italian cook shouldn’t all belong in the same World War II adventure. The fact that they do is absolutely why the film has so much charm and the source of nearly every problem I have here.

The dust, cannon smoke, and George Peppard’s confidence do so much of the depth of work in CANNON FOR CORDOBA, a 1970 western that knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be, even when it doesn’t always know how to make every piece matter. It has a dangerous trek into hostile territory, revenge simmering inside the group, a fortress waiting in the distance, and enough explosions to keep the screen busy whenever the story starts to sag. That combination doesn’t make it an overlooked legend, but it makes it a piece of genre filmmaking that offers plenty of lessons.

Anthony Selvon doesn’t need a stage that looks expensive. He doesn’t need a wall of screens, a roaring crowd, or the artificial polish that usually comes with men who sell certainty for a living. Give him a brick wall, a room, and enough silence between sentences, and he can still make his audience lean forward. That’s part of what makes I AM THE PRIZE anxious from the start. The film understands that influence isn’t always dressed like a pageant. Sometimes it comes through the door calmly, in a fitted suit, with carefully chosen language and a face that suggests he already knows the answer to every insecurity in the room.

The most memorable parts of FABRIC aren’t the runway images, though those have their own appeal. The film is at its strongest when it watches hands at work. Measuring, cutting, stitching, adjusting, correcting, because they all become more than technical gestures. They’re evidence of people building their lives through precision, patience, and skill in a world that too often talks about refugees as a problem to be managed rather than as people with talent, ambition, and futures worth investing in.

Action movies set against real-world conflict have to walk a narrow line. Push too far into exhibition, and the pain becomes decoration. Push too far into seriousness, and the movie can start acting embarrassed by the genre it belongs to. MAN OF WAR doesn’t always avoid those, but it does understand that every firefight needs something human underneath it. William Kaufman constructs the film as a tactical rescue thriller, then keeps trying to drag the violence back toward people who can’t simply walk away from the battlefield.

Hoku’s track “Perfect Day” has always felt inseparable from LEGALLY BLONDE, not just because it’s attached to one of the most recognizable openings of an era, but because it captures the fantasy of Elle Woods. The sun is out, the world feels open, and her confidence moves like it has a soundtrack of its own. That’s the shadow ELLE has to step into, and honestly, that made the series a little scary going in. A prequel to LEGALLY BLONDE (and its sequel) could’ve easily become a parade of easter eggs, a pink checklist of future traits, or a younger version trying too hard to make us forget Reese Witherspoon. Thankfully, Lexi Minetree’s portrayal doesn’t do that, and that’s why this works. She doesn’t erase Witherspoon’s Elle; she gives us the girl who could grow into her. ELLE is absolutely part of the same larger story. It also becomes its own story, finding room for high school ambiguity, family, heartbreak, and the early signs of a woman learning that being underestimated might someday become her greatest strength.

A glass of water shouldn’t feel like a warning, but ANIMALS. makes even the smallest act of hospitality seem dangerous. The short takes us into a house already marked by absence, where Zoya is sorting through the emotional aftermath of her mother’s death. Her grief isn’t presented as some grand breakdown. It’s in the air, in the quiet, in the sense that this place still belongs to someone who isn’t there anymore. Then Amelia arrives at the door with a story about an Airbnb mix-up, and the film turns the familiar into a trap. Zoya doesn’t invite disaster in because she’s foolish. She does it because most decent people have been trained to apologize for someone else’s inconvenience.

Lucile Hadžihalilović’s films don’t have any desire to explain themselves so much as seal the viewer inside a room and change the temperature, degree by degree. THE WORLDS OF LUCILE HADŽIHALILOVIĆ gathers four features that feel connected by instinct rather than formula: INNOCENCE, EVOLUTION, EARWIG, and THE ICE TOWER. Each one has its own rules, rituals, and textures, though all of them expand on childhood, control, desire, fear, and transformation without turning those ideas into easy resolutions. This Severin collection works because it understands that Hadžihalilović isn’t a filmmaker working strictly with plot mechanics. She’s a filmmaker of environments, thresholds, and things left unsaid.

SHADOWS OF WILLOW CABIN feels less interested in the workings of horror mechanics than emotional excavation. Writer/director Joe Fria’s debut feature uses supernatural horror almost as an extension of collapse, where ghosts, time looping, and whispering walls become manifestations of shame, repression, loneliness, and self-denial that have been rotting beneath the surface long before either character sets foot in the cabin.