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LOVELINES is the kind of 1980s teen comedy that seems less like it was written than pieced together from everything the era assumed young audiences wanted thrown at them at once. Rival high schools, pranks, horny side characters, fist fights, a Battle of the Bands, a forbidden romance, a protective brother built like a human wall, and Michael Winslow running a mysterious phone service all compete for control of the same 93 minutes. The movie rarely finds a strong enough reason for all of this to exist together, but there is still something weirdly watchable about how much it crams into the frame. It’s more like a half-busted jukebox that keeps skipping to the strangest possible track, and sometimes that’s enough to make it harder to dismiss than it probably deserves.

DI’ANNO: IRON MAIDEN’S LOST SINGER doesn’t examine Paul Di’Anno like a trivia answer in Iron Maiden history. It treats him as a man whose voice helped define a movement, whose life was scarred by bad decisions and bad luck, and whose final years deserved more than a footnote beneath the shadow of a much larger band. That distinction matters because this documentary could easily have become another fan-service extension of metal mythology, built around famous names, archival clips, and a familiar rise-and-fall. Director Wes Orshoski aims for something more intimate, following Di’Anno through a late-life stretch marked by failing health, financial desperation, humor, anger, gratitude, and a return to the stage that feels both triumphant and painful to watch.

AUDITION is one of those horror films whose reputation can almost work against it. The shockwave of it has traveled farther than the movie itself, turning certain images, sounds, and twists into the kind of cultural shorthand that makes new viewers feel as if they already know what they’re walking into. That familiarity doesn’t lessen the impact, though. If anything, it makes Takashi Miike’s patience feel even crueler. AUDITION doesn’t survive and thrive because of one infamous stretch. It survives because the entire film is built like a lie someone tells themselves until reality finally pushes back.

MARLOWE has the appeal of a movie caught between inheritance and reinvention. It carries the name of one of detective fiction’s great private eyes, borrows its bones from Raymond Chandler’s THE LITTLE SISTER, dresses itself in late-sixties Los Angeles, and then hands the role to James Garner, an actor whose natural portrayal works both for and against the material. The result isn’t one of the essential Philip Marlowe films, and it never quite shakes the feeling that it’s living in the shadow of stronger noir predecessors and more adventurous revisionist detective stories that would arrive soon after. There’s enough charm and curiosity here to make MARLOWE an enjoyable, if uneven, piece of transitional noir.

KOKUM & DOT knows something many modern children’s shows seem to forget, younger viewers don’t need to be overwhelmed to be moved. They need clarity, warmth, purposeful repetition, and a world that makes them feel like they’re part of it, rather than being forced on them. This live-action/animated children’s series, centered on Kokum Dorothy and her inquisitive puppet friend Dot, works because it treats learning as a shared experience. It’s gentle, but not empty. It’s simple, but not without impact. Most importantly, it places the Cree language, knowledge, memory, imagination, and emotional expression at the center of a children’s format without making any of those elements feel secondary to commercial expectations.

GOAT GIRL really explores the deepest ideas in the confusion adults leave behind when they expect children to accept the world without explanation. Writer/director Ana Asensio’s sophomore feature has a clear affection for childhood wonder, but it’s not interested in treating that curiosity as empty or pure. Elena, played by Alessandra González, is eight years old, preparing for her First Communion in 1988 Madrid, and trying to understand death, faith, class, prejudice, family tension, and the rules adults enforce with very little patience. That’s a lot for one film to carry, and GOAT GIRL is most successful when it lets those ideas thrive through Elena’s emotion, her questions, and the uncomfortable silences that follow.

THE VOICES OF OUR MOTHER understands that horror is more volatile than a family home after a medical emergency. A parent’s decline has a way of dragging old roles back into place, forcing adult children to become caretakers, witnesses, rivals, and frightened kids again, sometimes within the same window in time. Writer/director Mark O’Brien’s supernatural horror film uses that pressure as its foundation, then turns it into something darker. The house doesn’t just hold memories. It holds an accusation. It holds an obligation. It holds the kind of resentment that can outlast the people who caused it.

The funny thing about PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN is that the title itself sounds like an exaggeration at first, until they start sharing the receipts. Peter Asher wasn’t merely nearby when modern popular music kept changing shape. He was in the room, at the microphone, behind the glass, near the contracts, beside the artists, and often connected to the next major shift before anyone understood what it would become. Directors Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine don’t approach him like a household name everyone already knows. They treat him as the rare figure whose name may not always be familiar, even though his fingerprints are all over the artists, careers, rooms, and relationships that shaped multiple generations.

BLIND LOVE is most compelling when it treats repression as something physical, not just emotional. Shu-yi doesn’t simply seem unhappy in her marriage; she moves through her life like someone who has learned how to make herself smaller in every room she enters. The house is organized, the family image is intact, and the future has already been planned by everyone except the woman expected to keep it all from collapsing. That’s where Julian Mei-Yu Chou’s film finds what makes this film work, bleed, and hit like a ton of bricks in the exhaustion of a person who has become so used to performing that desire feels less like a romantic possibility than a threat to the entire system around her.

The first emotional breaking point in AFTER THE ACT isn’t presented as a confession. It’s more of a temperature change. Sam and Mia are in the same apartment, sharing the same routines, moving through the same space, and yet something has already shifted before anyone says it out loud. That is where Sarah Jayne Portelli and Ivan Malekin find the film’s most effective lensing. They’re not looking for the explosive aftermath of betrayal as much as the quieter, more uncomfortable stretch before language catches up to instinct. Someone senses a lie. Someone else tries to manage the room. A relationship that has become too familiar starts looking strange in its own reflection.

WHITE PALACE is one of those 90s adult dramas that feels rarer for me to discover now, not because every choice in it works, but because it’s actually willing to let grown people make uncomfortable decisions without soothing everything down into an ending where everyone is happy. The film is messy, sexual, class-conscious, occasionally awkward, and much more interesting when it lets its characters sit inside their contradictions than when it tries to push a square peg into a round hole. It’s not a perfect film, but it has enough bruised feeling and enough heat between Susan Sarandon and James Spader to remain more memorable than its uneven storytelling should allow.

By the time the 2021 version of I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER ended up coming out, the franchise had already had a long history. The original 1997 film never reached the same level as SCREAM, but it still became one of the defining teen slashers of that era. Jennifer Love Hewitt running down the street, screaming, Freddie Prinze Jr. trying to keep everyone together while falling apart himself, Sarah Michelle Gellar getting one of the genre’s most memorable sequences, the fisherman with the hook, the rain-soaked atmosphere, all of it cemented the movie into late-90s horror history, (oh and my uncredited cameo in the parade scene!) whether critics embraced it or not. Then came I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, which leaned harder into camp and slasher insanity, followed by the mostly forgotten direct-to-video reboot attempt I'LL ALWAYS KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER.

The story UNFORTUNATE FORTUNE explores works so well for a short because it doesn’t need a lot of explanation to start pulling the viewer in. A man is down on his luck, desperation has narrowed his options, and a visit to a fortune teller promises some kind of answer, opportunity, or escape. That’s enough. The film doesn’t need an elaborate mythology or a heavy backstory to make the situation feel familiar. The appeal comes from how quickly the premise taps into something. People don’t usually look in-depth at their own fate because life is going well. They seek it when control has already slipped away.

A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON comes at us with the kind of confidence that doesn’t need to declare itself through size. After years of Westeros being defined on television by royal houses, dynastic collapse, dragons, massacres, prophecy, and people turning every scene into a battlefield for power, this series does something that feels almost strange at first. It lowers the gaze, not out of ambition, but out of perspective. It follows a knight without a lot of money, a large conscience, and a young squire who knows far more than he lets on. That is exactly why the season works so well.

TIME MACHINE MAIDAN is the kind of documentary that not only asks viewers to remember history. It asks them to stand within its consequences. Roman Liubyi and Volodymyr Tykhyy’s film looks back at the Maidan revolution through the eyes of a generation now fighting a full-scale Russian invasion. That perspective changes the shape of the story. This isn’t only a vision of historical reflection. It’s a wounded return, a film made from the understanding that the past doesn’t stay behind you when the fight that started there never really ended.