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Family dinners are rarely as peaceful as the movies make them out to be. SUNDAY SAUCE leans into that chaos, delivering a bold, biting, and unexpectedly moving portrait of identity and inheritance—all packed into a brisk 14 minutes. Writer-director Matt Campanella’s short, fresh off its selection at the Oscar-qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival, proves that he has a knack for finding the emotional fault lines hidden beneath familiar rituals.

Some stories yell for your attention; others leave a lasting impression through moments told. ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS belongs to the latter. At only twenty-one minutes, Franz Böhm crafts an experience so immediate and emotionally raw that its brevity feels deceptive. This is not a war story told from afar, but an intimate portrait of survival shaped by those who lived its horror.

LARGO captures the enormity of global crises through the eyes of those most affected, offering an unfiltered look at the refugee experience from a child’s perspective without slipping into sentimentality. At just 19 minutes, the short is an emotional powerhouse, striking a balance between grief and hope.

FATHER is a film built on silence, endurance, and a kind of emotion that pulls the viewer into its world and refuses to let go. Directed by filmmaker Tereza Nvotová, the film has its world premiere at the 2025 Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti section. Here, Nvotová presents a story that begins with a single, devastating mistake and spirals into an exploration of guilt, love, and the fragile limits of forgiveness.

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR: AN AMERICAN POET is a compact but potent short film that dramatizes one of America’s most overlooked voices at a time when those words were desperately needed. Written and directed by Kane Stratton, the 10-minute drama reconstructs a moment from 1903 Dayton, Ohio, in which Dunbar, one of the first influential Black poets in American literature, stands against the incomplete promises of the Emancipation Proclamation forty years after it was signed. With a small cast and contained setting, the film succeeds in amplifying the timeless urgency of Dunbar’s call for compassion and sympathy.

BEYOND TRAINSPOTTING – THE WORLD OF IRVINE WELSH promises to take viewers further than the title that defined a generation, but what it ultimately delivers is a lively, sometimes messy documentary that never quite decides what it wants to be. Directed by Ray Burdis and Ian Jefferies, it assembles an impressive lineup of contributors—from rock icons like Iggy Pop and Bobby Gillespie to longtime collaborators like Danny Boyle and Ewan McGregor—yet the strongest presence throughout is Irvine Welsh himself. His voice, his wit, and his honesty remain the film’s greatest strengths, even when the documentary around him struggles.

Hollywood history is full of improbable success stories, but few properties seem more unlikely in retrospect than the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.’ Four anthropomorphic turtles trained in martial arts by a rat in the sewers of New York hardly screams mainstream appeal, and yet the franchise became a worldwide cultural juggernaut. Writer-director Vin Nucatola seizes on this irony with his 2019 short ITALIAN TURTLES, a nine-minute comedy that imagines the pitch meeting where it all might have begun. Equal parts parody and affectionate nod, the film thrives on deadpan humor and exaggerated performances that lean into the absurdity of trying to explain something so bizarre in a corporate setting.

The premise of FRENCH LESSONS sounds deceptively simple: two men meet in Los Angeles for a conversation before leaving for Cannes. Yet in its eight-minute runtime, the short becomes an exploration of the endless tug-of-war between commerce and creativity. Directors Kyle Garrett Greenberg and Anna Maguire position the film at the intersection of satire and genuineness, offering a brisk but layered reflection on how ego, ambition, and industry can make even a simple meeting feel like a battle of wills.

The pairing of BLUE (1968) and FADE IN (1973) in Imprint Films’ limited edition hardbox is one of those archival moves that could only come from a label willing to champion overlooked oddities. At first glance, these films might not seem to warrant such lavish treatment: one is a Western that has long carried a reputation for being miscast and misguided, and the other is a troubled romance that was buried by the studio system. But together—along with Daniel Kremer’s 2024 documentary CRUEL, USUAL, NECESSARY: THE PASSION OF SILVIO NARIZZANO—they create a narrative about ambition, compromise, and the kind of filmmakers whose legacies slip between the cracks of cinema history.

Every prequel runs the risk of telling a story we already know the ending to, but THE TERMINAL LIST: DARK WOLF manages to sidestep that trap by focusing not on what happens but on how it happens. Set before the events of the Chris Pratt-led hit series, this new Prime Video chapter follows Taylor Kitsch’s Ben Edwards through his transformation from Navy SEAL to CIA operative. The result is an espionage thriller that combines high-octane action with a sobering examination of the toll of compromise, loyalty, and ambition.

SOMNIUM doesn’t waste time presenting itself as a straightforward horror story. Instead, Racheal Cain’s debut feature embraces the unstable terrain of dreams and ambition, using both as fuel for a haunting exploration of identity, exploitation, and the desperate pursuit of success. It’s a film that feels pulled straight from the subconscious, where every room hides another reflection of fear and every door opens onto an opportunity that could just as easily devour you.

Some films whisper from the edge of consciousness, asking viewers not to understand them but to inhabit them. SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS, the new feature from Stephen and Timothy Quay, belongs entirely to that realm. After a two-decade hiatus from feature-length storytelling, the brothers have returned with a piece that is less a conventional narrative than a moving installation. This artwork navigates a space between cinema, sculpture, and the realm of dreams. It is as much a test of patience as it is a demonstration of creativity and imagination; it exists in the space between admiration and frustration.

THE FANTASTIC GOLEM AFFAIRS wastes no time announcing its intentions: this is not a world bound by rules. Within the first minutes, a rooftop game between friends ends with one of them plummeting to his death — only his body doesn’t break in the way ours would. Instead, he smashes into porcelain shards, as if he were never human at all. It’s a shocking image, absurd and unsettling, that sets the tone for what follows: a surreal odyssey where death, bureaucracy, and friendship intersect in a Spain that feels both familiar and utterly alien. This film isn’t what you think it will be, and then when you think you understand what it is, it resets expectations and becomes something else entirely.

STRANGER EYES is one of those films that gets under your skin before you even realize how deeply it has sunk in. Marketed as a surveillance thriller, it begins as a story of a couple unraveling in the wake of their daughter’s disappearance, only to transform into something far more — a meditation on observation, grief, and the ways people fracture under relentless scrutiny. While its icy craftsmanship is in the tradition of cerebral European and Asian thrillers, Yeo Siew Hua’s direction never settles for homage. Instead, it carves out its unnerving exploration, sometimes alienating in its patience, but never less than fascinating.

High school movies never truly go out of style; they simply reflect the anxieties and experiences of each generation. ALMOST POPULAR joins that lineage with a familiar setup—a pair of misfit best friends chasing the approval of the cool kids—but it spins that story with a blend of modern social media, heartfelt friendship, and a clear love for the teen comedies of the ’90s and 2000s. Director Nayip Anthony Garcia makes his feature debut with something that manages to be both broad and unique, balancing humiliation with a sincere message about self-worth.