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THE COPENHAGEN TEST is the kind of espionage series that understands restraint as a strength rather than a limitation. Instead of leaning into globe-trotting excess or constant escalation, the show commits to a quieter, more unsettling tension rooted in surveillance, paranoia, and identity (think Tom Clancy). It operates in a space just adjacent to our present moment; close enough to feel plausible, but distant enough to let its ideas breathe. That proximity is what gives the series its edge.

THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS approaches the climate crisis from a place most films avoid; not through end-of-days scenarios, statistics, or apocalyptic imagery, but through grief, faith, and a single woman’s refusal to accept inevitability. It is a short film with an inspiring premise and the discipline to explore it without sensationalizing it. Rather than asking audiences to fear the future, it asks them to sit with a present that already feels unbearable for those carrying the burden first.

IN THE CLOUDS is an intimate, restrained, and observant; it's a story about displacement that stays focused on the lived reality within a home, not the version of migration audiences have been trained to expect. Even at fourteen minutes, it carries itself like an experience, because it understands exactly where to place the camera and when to let the audience sit with what is not being said.

O.C. AND STIGGS plays less like a teen comedy and more like an act of cinematic vandalism. It does not invite the audience in so much as dare them to keep up. Robert Altman takes the skeletal framework of a National Lampoon story and uses it as an excuse to poke, prod, and openly antagonize the polite surfaces of Reagan-era suburbia. The result is messy, abrasive, occasionally funny, and frequently frustrating; it is also unmistakably the work of a filmmaker who had no interest in making something tidy or universally appealing.

SAGA OF THE PHOENIX arrives with the unmistakable energy of late-1980s Hong Kong fantasy cinema; boundless imagination, fearless tonal shifts, and an almost reckless commitment to spectacle. As a follow-up to THE PEACOCK KING, it occupies an uneasy middle ground. It is more playful, more accessible, and far less interested in sustained menace. That shift does not sink the film, but it fundamentally changes what kind of experience this sequel aims to be.

By the time SCARS OF DRACULA arrived on the scene, the Hammer Dracula cycle was already showing wear. Audiences knew what to expect: the villagers warn new travelers, castles loom, blood flows, Dracula is destroyed, and somehow always returns. What makes this entry interesting is not that it reinvents the formula, but that it seems almost irritated by it. This is a nastier, more aggressive film than many of its predecessors, one that leans into cruelty, violence, and discomfort as if daring the audience to either keep up or look away. Whether that approach works is debatable, but it absolutely gives the film a distinct personality within the series.

There’s a special kind of panic that only exists inside a community theater; the kind that starts as “we’ll figure it out” and ends with someone handing off a switchblade because of a prop malfunction while another person argues about blocking like it’s a national security briefing. COMMUNITY THEATER CHRISTMAS understands that panic, and it builds the comedy around the idea that a stage can be both a sanctuary and a pressure cooker. The premise is simple: a struggling small-town theater needs a grant to stay alive, and the path to that grant runs straight through an original Christmas production that has no business being this hard to pull off.

THE MIGHTY OAKS approaches the story with a clarity that many sports documentaries chase but rarely succeed in. Rather than framing the narrative around a single season or a simple pursuit of victory, the film positions that final 2024 campaign as the emotional endpoint of something much larger. This is not a documentary about a team suddenly discovering greatness; it is about what happens when belief, patience, and responsibility are tested over nearly a decade. By the time the season begins, the audience already understands that the outcome matters less than what the program has come to represent.

PAULA TAKES THE STAGE is a small, scrappy short that understands a very specific truth about performance: the stage is not always a sanctuary; sometimes it is a pressure cooker, sometimes it is a mirror you cannot look away from. Set inside a 1940s theater and built around a once-celebrated actress attempting to reinvent herself, the film focuses on the quiet terror of being perceived. Not just watched, but judged; not just remembered, but compared to whatever version of you the crowd decided on.

ELWAY, without question, is the definitive documentary on one of the NFL’s most iconic quarterbacks, and in many ways, it fulfills exactly what it promises. The film traces John Elway’s career with an obvious reverence for its subject, moving from his early dominance at Stanford through the defining highs and lows of his sixteen seasons with the Denver Broncos. For longtime football fans, the stories will feel instantly recognizable. For casual viewers, the film provides a clean, accessible timeline of a career that helped shape modern quarterback mythology. What it does not attempt, however, is to reinterpret that mythology or challenge it.

DAN CURTIS’ GOTHIC TALES brings together two made-for-television literary adaptations that embody both the strengths and the limitations of 1970s broadcast horror. Produced for ABC’s Wide World of Mystery and shot on videotape, these works feel unmistakably bound to their era. Yet they also reflect a genuine seriousness about horror as a psychological and moral inquiry rather than a cheap chaos. This is not horror designed to startle. It’s horror meant to linger, to unsettle through implication, repression, and rot beneath polite surfaces.

THE NINJA TRILOGY exists in a very specific pocket of 1980s cinema where sincerity, excess, and outright insanity collide without apology. Taken together, ENTER THE NINJA, REVENGE OF THE NINJA, and NINJA III: THE DOMINATION form a progression that feels less like a planned arc and more like a gradual surrender to escalation. What begins as a relatively grounded martial arts action picture evolves into something delirious, supernatural, and proudly unhinged. That evolution is the trilogy’s greatest strength.

THE DEATH WISH COLLECTION occupies a strange, often uncomfortable corner of American genre history. It’s a franchise born out of cultural anxiety, one that slowly mutates into something far less reflective and far more reactionary as it goes. Watching all five films together isn’t just a matter of tracking Paul Kersey’s escalating body count; it’s watching the moral center erode in real time, film by film, until vengeance becomes its own self-justifying logic.

COVER-UP positions investigative journalism not as a profession, but as a long-term act of resistance. Directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, the documentary traces the career of Seymour Hersh with a focus that is both methodical and urgent, presenting his work as a sustained challenge to institutional power rather than a series of isolated scoops. From the outset, the film makes it clear that this is not a conventional biographical overview. It is an examination of process, persistence, and the personal cost of telling stories that powerful institutions would prefer to bury. No matter your thoughts on the film, it’s somehow more timely than it was in Hersh’s prime; the parallels to today's stories are crystal clear.

AMMA’S PRIDE presents a rare kind of love story: a mother who meets her daughter’s truth with tenderness instead of hesitation. The film opens with an intimacy that might disarm viewers expecting a louder, angrier documentary about trans rights. Instead, it finds strength in conviction. There is no sermonizing and no slow march from hardship to triumph in the typical documentary mold. What emerges is something more grounded: a portrait of a family that never broke, even when tradition and state policy tried to break them.

KUMAIL NANJIANI: NIGHT THOUGHTS feels less like a victory lap and more like a check-in. After nearly a decade away from the stand-up stage, Nanjiani returns not with a reinvention or a carefully manufactured “comeback” but with something more reflective. The decision to return to Chicago, where his stand-up career first began, gives the special an understated emotional grounding that informs everything that follows. There’s something heartwarming about the full circle and the appreciation that Nanjiani shows for the reality he lives in.

INSIDE, THE VALLEY SINGS is one of those films that quietly settles into your head and refuses to leave. At just fifteen minutes, it doesn’t waste time trying to shock or provoke through sensation or description. Instead, it builds something far more unsettling: an intimate, sustained portrait of what prolonged solitary confinement does to the human mind, and how imagination becomes both refuge and lifeline when all physical connection has been stripped away.

FREYR offers a twist with something that would be absurd in another film: a hand growing from a man’s chest. The image is impossible to process without curiosity. What would a life look like with a body so visibly different that strangers never learn to see anything else? Instead of treating the condition as a metaphor, the film places it within a funeral, where a coworker tries to make sense of the friendship that formed around that difference. By starting after Freyr is gone, the film collapses time. Everything we learn about him arrives through memory, grief, and the gratitude that comes from being truly seen by one person in a world that never learned how to look.

THE BOY WITH WHITE SKIN delivers into a sense of purpose that is immediate and unforced, grounding its story in the kind of reality that is rarely shown with this level of clarity. What unfolds is a portrait of a child whose presence is treated as both a gift and a burden, someone caught within a belief system older than he is, shaped by adults who view him as more of a symbol than an individual. Writer/director Simon Panay’s work is built on over a decade of on-the-ground immersion, and the depth of that commitment is evident from the details woven throughout the film. Even without stating it outright, you feel the years of observation behind every gesture, every glance, every unspoken rule that governs the mining community.

Something is compelling about watching two men cross each other with equal parts suspicion and longing for connection, and MY NEIGHBOR ADOLF leans into that with surprising tenderness. What begins as a clash between strangers slowly reveals itself as a story about the emotional weight people carry long after the world believes they should have healed. This film thrives not because of its mystery, but because of how it reframes paranoia, grief, and the possibility of companionship in the unlikeliest landscape.

MUSHROOM DAD offers up a unique experience as a short film that suggests a feature-length understanding of character, tone, and emotional timing. Michael Yuchen Lei’s story unfolds over the course of a single life-changing evening, set against the chaos of a restaurant opening, with something far more focused at its center. Julian, a young chef hoping to define himself through his craft, is confronted by the father he keeps at arm’s length. Their strained relationship is immediately evident in how they occupy the same space—Julian’s control clashing with his father’s dissolution, each trying to mask the emotional toll beneath their interactions. The film wastes no time establishing a sense of frayed connection. When the accident sends everything spiraling, it becomes clear that the chaos simply forces into the open what both men have been burying.

Some pandemic stories flood the screen with chaos because it makes the fear easier to process. NO MORE TIME goes in the opposite direction — it drains the world until there’s barely anything left. The setting of empty cabins in the mountains, half-finished sentences on the radio, and two people trying to hold onto themselves even as the world outside forces everyone into a state of survival that looks more feral than human. It’s a pandemic movie, but it isn’t recreating headlines. It’s more interested in the slow deterioration of trust when catastrophe becomes normal.

There’s a rule that most horror films embrace without question: fear is loud. Doors slam, footsteps echo, voices distort, and the score claws its way into the viewer like a physical force. HAUNTERS OF THE SILENCE rejects that approach. Its opening passages establish a different kind of dread — one built on stillness, interrupted breaths, and the quiet weight of unresolved memory. Rather than giving in to fear, it studies it, letting isolation become as threatening as any creature or loud jump scare. I want to start with clarity: this film wasn’t for me, but some will absolutely love it.

BITTER DESIRE offers up the kind of premise that could easily fuel a tight, grounded thriller: a wounded police officer, a nurse who isn’t who she claims to be, and a home that becomes a battleground for misplaced trust. Conceptually, it’s a setup built for tension. The problem is that the final film never finds a way to make that tension feel convincing. What emerges instead is a well-intentioned project that struggles to rise above its limitations, even though you can see the filmmakers cared deeply about getting it made.

A world-ending disaster usually brings along chaos, cities crashing into rubble, and a camera shouting over the noise. WE BURY THE DEAD works in the opposite direction. The catastrophe has already happened. It’s quiet now. Ash settles, bodies lie where they fell, and the survivors are left to clean up the pieces without answers or time to process. The film is built around a simple idea: when the dead refuse to stay buried, grief doesn’t disappear; it intensifies. Zak Hilditch approaches the premise with restraint, focusing less on gore and more on the fallout of a world that suddenly made no sense.