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There’s nothing glamorous about inheriting a giant range of forest, especially when you have no idea what you’re supposed to do with it. For Frieda, it initially looks less like a gift and more like another problem keeping her from the life she’s been working toward. MEMORIES OF A FOREST takes that situation and uses it to look at family obligation, money, and how easily one generation’s sacrifices can become the next generation’s responsibility.

KNIFE: THE ATTEMPTED MURDER OF SALMAN RUSHDIE is one of those documentaries where you know going in that parts of it are going to be difficult to watch. I wasn't prepared for how much of that would come from seeing what happened afterward rather than simply revisiting the attack itself. Rushdie survived being stabbed repeatedly onstage in 2022, but survival was only the beginning of what he and his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, had to endure.

If LION FIST had shown up on a video store shelf in the 90s, nobody would have questioned it. The tournament, the training, the rock music, the colorful fighters, and even the ridiculously straightforward motivation all belong to a particular era of martial arts movies. Director Taim M. Adams isn't trying to reinvent any of that, and the movie is probably more enjoyable once you realize he has absolutely no interest in doing so.

For almost a decade, there’s been one image that’s followed Colin Kaepernick everywhere. Kneeling on an NFL sideline during the national anthem. THE PERILOUS FIGHT gives him enough room to tell the much larger story surrounding that moment. Kaepernick goes back to his childhood, his relationship with race and identity, his obsessive love of sports, his rise through college football, the Super Bowl years, his growing political awareness, his activism, and the life he’s continued building since leaving the NFL.

There’s a kind of exhaustion that comes from watching people making themselves miserable in the pursuit of companionship, especially when everyone involved seems convinced there must be a better person just one swipe away. FLOATING CAROUSEL understands what exhaustion really is and, instead of trying to make modern dating look appealing, turns it into something increasingly ridiculous, uncomfortable, and eventually just unhinged. It’s funny because so much of what happens feels exaggerated right up until you realize that very little of it seems impossible.

The easiest way to understand the WICKED PRIEST films is to forget about trying to make sense of Shinkai as a respectable Buddhist monk. No, seriously, I know that goes against logic, but hear me out. Tomisaburō Wakayama plays him as a walking contradiction who drinks, gambles, chases women, picks fights, and regularly behaves in ways that should have him thrown out of any order willing to claim him. Then somebody vulnerable needs help, corruption starts hurting ordinary people, and Shinkai suddenly becomes the most principled person in the room.

There’s no point in going into STOP! THAT! TRAIN! And thinking you’re going to ask it to calm down. Adam Shankman’s disaster comedy feels as though somebody locked the volume at eleven, cut the brake lines, and then dared the cast to see who could deliver the most ridiculous joke without blinking. That approach gives you some genuinely funny stretches, plenty of groaners, and a movie that is probably much easier to enjoy once you accept that restraint was never invited aboard.

When you think about all of the names in this film, YOU HAD TO BE THERE almost sounds unbelievable. Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Dave Thomas, Paul Shaffer, and several others somehow converged around the same 1972 Toronto production of GODSPELL before most of the world had any idea who they were. Director Nick Davis doesn’t treat that as some trivia question with an unusually impressive answer; he wants to understand what happened when all of those people found each other before fame complicated any of it. In the end, there really isn’t an answer for what made the stars align, literally, for this event.

Sarah seems to be the only one who knows this is a bad idea before anything actually goes wrong. GOODY GOODY doesn’t begin by asking us to wonder whether the secluded home birth is risky. Midwife Sarah has already done that, voiced her concerns, and reluctantly shown up anyway because the alternative may be leaving an expectant mother to attempt it without someone qualified. Horror usually gets a lot of mileage out of people ignoring obvious warning signs. However, writyer/director Raymond Creamer’s film is more interesting when it concentrates on the person who recognizes every warning sign and still feels morally obligated to stay.

The island in THE WORLD BEFORE doesn't start as feeling like somewhere Jin needs to escape. It’s the entirety of what she knows, a place where the sea determines activity, familiar faces keep turning up, and the geography has quietly decided the boundaries of her life before she was old enough to question them. Writer/director Yoon Dan-bi makes that important because the movie isn't about discovering that home is terrible; it's about reaching the age when home suddenly stops being the only imaginable world.

Anyone hoping for a documentary in which historians act as talking heads and explain Brian Mulroney’s legacy in chronological order should probably check out what Matthew Rankin has made before walking into this one. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BRIAN MULRONEY takes the television presentation of Canada’s 18th prime minister, throws it into something resembling a malfunctioning video deck, and lets politics, propaganda, nostalgia, advertising, ambition, and national identity crash into each other for 105 minutes. Somehow, beneath all that deliberate chaos, Rankin manages to make a surprisingly coherent argument about the kind of politician Mulroney was and the country that helped create him.

The men in HEAD TO HEAD are perfectly willing to support their director's artistic vision until that vision becomes uncomfortable. Suddenly the clothes are too hot, the restrictions are unreasonable, their dignity is being challenged, and something they accepted in theory becomes much harder to tolerate once they're the ones expected to live with it. Ghasideh Golmakani doesn't exactly hide the point she's making, but this is one of those cases where subtlety might actually weaken the joke.

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.

Carol Nguyen spends the majority of STILL NIGHT, BURNING HOUSE listening to people who have spent years hiding what they feel. That gives this documentary its influence, because silence isn't presented as a simple problem waiting for somebody brave enough to break it. Sometimes silence causes damage, sometimes it protects someone who wasn't ready to speak, and sometimes it has simply become so familiar that nobody knows how to live without it.

Three seasons into TULSA KING, Dwight Manfredi doesn’t just feel like a New York gangster stranded in Oklahoma. Tulsa belongs to him now, or at least he certainly acts as if it does, and that change gives Season Three a different feeling from the fish-out-of-water comedy that originally made the series so easy to enjoy. Dwight has a business, employees, allies, rivals, family, and enough people expecting a cut of something that his exile has effectively become another criminal kingdom.