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There’s a meaningful, painful story buried inside THE GOAT, and the frustrating thing is how often the film seems to know it. Ilaria Borrelli’s English/Arabic language drama has urgency, anger, and a young lead performance strong enough to hold attention, even when the movie around it keeps buffing complex issues down to blunt dramatic points.

The woods in CAMP don’t feel like an escape from the world. They feel like a place where every bad thought is more like an echo. Avalon Fast’s latest feature takes the familiar idea of a summer camp horror movie and pulls it apart until something different, sadder, and more personal remains. Cabins, campfires, counselors, rituals, secrets in the trees, those ingredients are all there, but CAMP isn’t built around the usual slasher expectations. It’s more interested in how grief mutates when someone is too young to understand it, too guilty to process it, and too desperate for absolution to recognize the danger in being welcomed too quickly.

Wim Verstappen’s 1972 Dutch satire arrives in its restored Cult Epics edition with provocation, made in the aftermath of BLUE MOVIE and carrying many of the same era’s obsessions with sex, commerce, liberation, and rot. The result isn’t an easy rediscovery. It’s blunt, unpleasant, dry, funny, occasionally brilliant, and often so committed to making its audience squirm that entertainment becomes almost incidental to the attack.

Some physical media releases are about preserving great cinema. Others are about preserving a moment when it took chances, got weird, heavily synthesized, acted questionably, and somehow became immortal. MORTAL KOMBAT KOLLECTION belongs proudly to the second group. This Arrow Video release doesn’t make a case that both original live-action MORTAL KOMBAT films are secretly pure cinema waiting for critical reappraisal. It does something more useful. It treats them as objects of fan memory, genre history, studio ambition, arcade-era mythology, and pure 90s excess. On that level, this set is an absolute beast.

A beautiful image can only protect a character for so long. SKIN OF YOUTH is filled with images that glimmer, ache, seduce, and sting, but the longer Ash Mayfair’s second feature goes on, the more its beauty starts to feel like it's trapped inside a story that keeps choosing pain as its language. This is a visually commanding, emotionally sincere film with clear personal conviction behind it. It also becomes frustrating in the way it repeatedly pushes its transgender lead through brutality, humiliation, and sacrifice until the character’s humanity sometimes has to fight against the movie’s own appetite for suffering.

War films often return to the same ideas because those images are so impactful and clear. Soldiers, weapons, destroyed buildings, emptied streets, families running, bodies waiting to be counted. ANIMALS IN WAR doesn’t ignore any of that devastation, but it changes the point of entry. The film looks at Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine through animals caught inside the human-made catastrophe, and that is more than a framing device. It strips war of its arguments, slogans, strategies, and excuses until all that remains is harm spreading outward from people who started it to every living thing forced to endure it.

CABALI AND THE TIKI MUG OBSESSION is built around recognition, that strange little feeling when someone explains a passion so specifically, so intensely, and with such open-hearted conviction that even outsiders to the subculture start to understand the importance. Tiki mugs may sound like novelty objects, the kind of thing someone buys on vacation, forgets in a cabinet, or spots on a dusty thrift store shelf. Josh Dragotta’s film treats them differently, with a respect that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. It sees them as sculpture, memory, history, community, and mythology, sometimes all at once.

A gun can make a coward look dangerous for a while. That’s the “joke” running through AESTHETICS OF A BULLET, a yakuza film that understands power less as something possessed than something carried out by men desperate to be mistaken for more than they are. Sadao Nakajima’s 1973 film has the feeling of a crime film, but its real target is the fantasy of importance. It’s about a man handed a suit, a gun, and money, then sent into another gang’s territory as human ammunition. The tragedy is not that he doesn’t know he’s expendable. The tragedy is that, even knowing it, he can’t help but admire the disguise.

As an experience, there’s a version of A MAN COULD GET KILLED that almost would have worked by accident. Because James Garner had the kind of screen presence that could make confusion feel like a reasonable state of being. Drop him into Lisbon, surround him with smugglers, diplomats, mistaken identities, stolen diamonds, suspicious people, badly timed assassinations, and enough shifting loyalties to make the plot feel like it’s being rewritten mid-chase, and he still gives the film a center.

Rosie hears about Berghain the way a lonely child might hear about Oz, heaven, or a place where the people at home can no longer reach you. BREAKFAST AT BERGHAIN builds itself around sincere longing, sending a sheltered small-town girl from a miserable family breakfast to one of the most mythologized nightclubs in the world. The joke is obvious enough, but writer/director Autumn Palen doesn’t treat it only as a punchline. The short is funnier when it leans into Berghain as an impossible idea rather than a real destination. Techno becomes religion, escape, community, and self-erasure all at once.

There’s an undeniable ache that comes from realizing your life worked out, only to wonder how part of you vanished. WELCOME TO THE FISHBOWL builds from that uncomfortable middle space, where maturity has already handed out responsibilities, compromises, habits, resentments, and routines, but ambition hasn’t gone quiet. The film isn’t about a woman trying to become young. It’s about a woman trying to remember what wanting something for herself felt like before everyone else’s needs drowned it out.

YOU LIGHT UP MY LIFE is remembered because of what escaped. The title song became a cultural artifact, the Oscar winner, the radio staple, the piece everyone could identify, even if they had never seen a frame of the film from which it came. That imbalance is impossible to ignore while watching the movie now, because the song has a clarity that holds everything together. The music knows exactly how to rise. The movie keeps looking for its footing.

FAST FORWARD has the confidence of a movie that believes sheer effort can overcome almost anything. That shows up in the characters, the choreography, the soundtrack, and even the film’s more awkward turns. It doesn’t have the same level of esteem as the decade’s most famous dance films, and it’s rarely subtle about where it’s headed. But, unquestionably, there’s a sincere electricity running through it that keeps the whole thing from becoming just another forgotten 80s curiosity. It’s corny, bright, uneven, determined, and often far more charming than the formula should allow.

Some action movies feel like they survive their because of their dents and bruises. COLD STEEL is one of those rough 80s cop thrillers where the flaws are easy to spot, sometimes impossible to ignore, but ultimately, they don’t come close to erasing the strange appeal of watching it push against and through its own limitations. It’s too uneven to call overlooked greatness, too clunky to pretend its story mechanics are perfect, and too personality-packed to dismiss as disposable. The movie lives in that chaotic middle ground where a few sharp edges, a few bizarre choices, and some hard-hitting action keep it from falling off the ledge whenever the drama stalls.

Peak View has the kind of small-town appeal that makes even the worst trouble feel manageable, heartbreak feel temporary, and wine production look only slightly less stressful than hand-to-hand combat. UNDER THE VINES: SERIES 2 really dives into that contrast from the start. It doesn’t try to reinvent the show after its first season. It lets Daisy Monroe and Louis Oakley settle deeper into Oakley Wines, then gently starts pulling at all the emotions they hoped might loosen on their own.