McLean‘s Hometown News Site

THE DEMON’S ROOK is the kind of horror artifact that earns its place on a late-night shelf through sheer willpower. Made on weekends with a group of friends, cast in latex and fog, and pointed squarely at anyone who missed the hand-built monsters, it’s an oddity that wears its influence proudly. You can feel the lineage: nightmares, ritual nonsense that plays like a dare, and a devotion to practical effects that puts much pricier productions to shame. On those terms, it’s a blast—an unruly parade of demons, zombies, slime, and the occult that proves enthusiasm can do a lot of heavy lifting.

SUNFISH (& OTHER STORIES ON GREEN LAKE) is a soft-spoken anthology with a backbone. It moves with the logic of a true summer—people arrive, drift into each other’s worlds, and leave changed in ways they won’t fully understand until later. Across four interlocking stories, the film treats the lake not as scenery but as the constant: a place where lessons are learned, responsibilities sneak up on kids and adults alike, and every victory feels earned because it’s so small you could miss it if you blinked. Sierra Falconer writes and directs with a confidence that favors presence over plot; the film is less about what happens than how it settles in your chest after.

When memory becomes a commodity, truth is no longer sacred—it’s transactional. That’s the unsettling premise behind FALSEHOOD, a high-concept Canadian sci-fi thriller from director Ethan Hickey. While ambitious and full of provocative ideas, the film occasionally leans too heavily on its philosophical framing. Still, there’s no denying its scope. For a low-budget production, it manages to feel expansive, polished, and politically charged, threading personal drama through a near-future narrative steeped in surveillance, power, and faith.

The marketing tagline promised “HIGH NOON in space,” but that undersells what OUTLAND actually achieves. Peter Hyams takes the bones of a Western—one good man against an empire of corruption—and transplants it to a mining colony orbiting Jupiter’s moon Io. It’s as bleak as it sounds: six hundred million miles from home, the air is synthetic, the work is brutal, and every worker is disposable. The colony, Con-Am 27, has the energy of a late-stage capitalist nightmare. Productivity is worshipped, human life is collateral, and one man dares to ask why miners keep dying in such spectacular, gruesome ways.

If there’s one thing Jess Franco could always do, it was find the line between camp and sleaze—and dance across the line with a grin. DEATH PACKS A SUITCASE (also known as Der Todesrächer von Soho or The Avenger of Soho) is one of the director’s stranger entries: a playful, oddly clean-cut mystery with all the hallmarks of German “Krimi” cinema and just enough Franco flavor to keep it weird. For an artist better known for erotic exploitation and psychotropic nightmares, this 1972 London-set whodunit feels like a weekend vacation—blood light but heavy on personality.

There’s a moment in AI WEIWEI’S TURANDOT when art and activism stop being separate entities and merge into something entirely new, for Ai Weiwei, whose career has always been an act of rebellion, directing an opera feels both unexpected and inevitable. The artist who once dropped a 2,000-year-old urn in the name of challenging authority now orchestrates Puccini’s Turandot inside the Rome Opera House—turning one of Western culture’s grandest traditions into a living statement on censorship, humanity, and power.

WALK WITH ME is exactly what its title promises: an invitation to stay present as a marriage reshapes itself around early-onset Alzheimer’s. Shot over four years by filmmaker and casting director Heidi Levitt, the film tracks her husband, Charlie Hess—an artist, father, and community builder—through the incremental changes that a diagnosis brings. There’s no manufactured drama here. Instead, we get the paces of real life: clinic visits, family conversations, small victories, and the tougher days when words slip, plans falter, and the world narrows. The honesty of that approach is the documentary’s power. It doesn’t explain Alzheimer’s so much as it lets you inhabit its slow encroachment, moment by moment.

THE WRONG ARM OF THE LAW sits in that distinct pocket where caper mechanics and manners share top billing. A crew of impostors dressed as police keeps robbing the robbers, forcing London’s crooks and the Yard to cooperate just to restore the “proper” order of things. That inversion is where the film lives—less in a belly-laugh sort of way and more in the absurdity of villains and cops negotiating work rules like rival trade unions.

OLIVE is that rare short film that doesn’t feel confined by time. Thirteen minutes pass, but it leaves an emotional afterglow that lingers like a full-length drama etched into your mind. Written, directed, and co-starring Tom Koch, it’s an intimate portrayal of love, loss, and identity through the lens of Alzheimer’s. This isn’t a film about the disease itself — it’s about the humanity caught inside. And with Lesley Ann Warren delivering a performance of astonishing grace, OLIVE stands as one of the year’s most powerful achievements in short-form storytelling.

GOING TO THE DOGS begins with silence — the kind that hangs heavy over an empty stadium, its lights long gone out. For much of the 20th century, this was the soundtrack of working-class Britain. Greyhound racing wasn’t just a pastime; it was a ritual, a community, a shared language of excitement and release. Director Greg Cruttwell’s documentary treats that history not as nostalgia, but as a question: what happens when a culture built on speed, noise, and adrenaline is forced to slow down and listen?

Alireza Khatami’s THE THINGS YOU KILL seeps in—an atmospheric riddle where vengeance and grief walk the same path until they’re indistinguishable. On its surface, it’s about a man haunted by his mother’s suspicious death and a gardener coerced into revenge. Beneath that, it’s about the futility of trying to purify pain with more violence. Every frame feels like a confession whispered into a well, knowing the echo will return distorted.

Dan Curtis’ DEAD OF NIGHT plays like a séance conducted through a TV antenna — flickering, imperfect, yet oddly intimate. First aired in 1977 and now preserved through Kino Lorber’s new release, this trio of stories captures the singular magic of broadcast horror: the sensation that something dark could slip through your living room at any moment. It’s uneven, yes, but within its framework lies the DNA of an entire generation’s fear.

HAZBIN HOTEL: SEASON 2 isn’t a continuation—it’s a relapse. A gorgeous, glittering, gloriously depraved relapse. Vivienne Medrano’s chaotic, bloodstained Broadway in Hell returns with sharper claws, higher heels, and more show-stopping numbers than Heaven could ever forgive. After Charlie Morningstar’s little “oops, I accidentally won a war against Heaven” moment, the Hotel is booming. Demons are checking in like it’s a cruise ship for the damned—but most of them aren’t looking for redemption. They’re looking for clout, chaos, and free room service.

DEADMAN’S BARSTOOL is a queer-tinged cocktail of noir, satire, and charisma—served straight up with a splash of sleaze. Written and directed by Dean Dempsey, co-written with Greg Mania, the film was made in 2018 but now finds new life through Anchor Bay’s Blu-ray reissue. It’s a murder-mystery that plays like a warped sermon about lust, power, and the hypocrisy of modern faith, filtered through a lens that reveres John Waters, early Todd Haynes, and the chaotic, anything-goes spirit of downtown New York’s underground art scene. For all its rough edges and microbudget limitations, there’s something magnetic about the film’s boldness—it’s the kind of noir that feels too alive, too sly to moralize, and too aware of its own absurdity to take itself too seriously.

DAN CURTIS’ CLASSIC MONSTERS arrives like a midnight séance—summoning the very foundation of horror storytelling into the comforting glow of the TV. The set puts three of the most ambitious TV horror productions of their time: DRACULA (1974), FRANKENSTEIN (1973), and THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE (1968). Produced or directed by Dan Curtis, the man responsible for DARK SHADOWS (so maybe I have a soft spot), these films represent a remarkable collision between the gothic grandeur of Universal’s golden age and the intimacy of 70s television. What Kino Lorber presents here under its Kino Cult banner is not merely a nostalgia trip—it’s a reclamation of television horror as art, which thrives within constraints rather than collapsing under them.

LESBIAN SPACE PRINCESS is the kind of movie that doesn’t just wink at its audience—it throws glitter in their face and asks them to sing along. Directed and written by Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs, the animated feature is a sugar rush of queer pandemonium that manages to balance its campiness with genuine heart. Beneath its chaotic, candy-colored surface lies something surprisingly heartfelt: a story about anxiety, self-worth, and learning to love yourself even when your brain insists you shouldn’t.

FAMILIAR TOUCH begins the way memory does — halfway through a thought, in motion before you realize where you’re headed. Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) moves through her house performing small, almost automatic tasks: slicing fruit, turning on a burner, checking a pan that’s already empty. The gestures make sense only because they’ve been repeated for decades. Yet writer/director Sarah Friedland uses these simple actions to pull us into something far less ordinary — a portrait of a woman whose body still remembers a life her mind has started to lose.

STITCH HEAD aims straight for the spot where spooky meets sweet: a PG “horror” that plays with the Frankenstein myth from the kids’ table without talking down to them. High above a little town, a mad professor keeps churning out monsters and promptly forgets about them, leaving his first, smallest creation to hold the whole place together. A traveling showman shows up promising love and limelight, and our stitched-together caretaker is tempted to chase the attention instead of the community he’s already built. That arc—validation versus belonging—gives the film its pulse. It’s more of a comedy adventure with cobweb trim, closer in spirit to a storybook campfire tale than anything actually frightening.

There are horror films that aim to frighten, disturb, or repulse — and then there’s MARTYRS. Pascal Laugier’s 2008 film doesn’t just cross the line; it redraws it entirely. Newly restored in 4K by Eureka Entertainment’s Masters of Cinema series, the film remains as devastating and divisive as it was at release. It’s the kind of experience that doesn’t feel like watching a movie so much as enduring one. But in that endurance lies its genius. Laugier created something few filmmakers attempt: a story where violence is not spectacle, but a form of spiritual confrontation. It’s horror as philosophy, and philosophy as punishment.

When horror uses reality as its foundation, the results can be devastatingly effective. LANDLORD leans on that principle—weaponizing the all-too-familiar power imbalance between tenant and property owner—and gives it literal teeth. Set in a sweltering, rundown apartment complex that feels like it's decaying in real time, the story centers on a bounty hunter who arrives to collect a stolen briefcase, only to find herself entangled in a far darker kind of transaction. Her unexpected ally is a young boy named Alex, orphaned when his mother falls victim to an attack from a “landlord”. A premise that practically bleeds irony, fusing folklore with financial predation.

RUNNING FOR THE MOUNTAINS begins with an image most Americans would recognize—a rolling Appalachian horizon that feels both eternal and endangered. The documentary quickly upends that serenity, revealing a region defined less by its natural beauty than by the industries exploiting it. Directed by Julie Eisenberg and Babette Hogan, the film is an unflinching look at how fossil fuel extraction and deregulation have turned West Virginia into a cautionary case study in environmental sacrifice and political rot.

Abel Ferrara’s MS. 45 wastes no time showing what kind of story it wants to tell. The film drops us into a version of New York that feels dangerous even in the daylight—crowded, indifferent, and predatory. Within hours, Thana, a garment-district seamstress, is assaulted twice. What follows isn’t just another revenge narrative; it’s a stripped-down character study about how trauma hardens into purpose. Ferrara and Zoë Lund, who was only seventeen during filming, created something raw and unnerving from material that could have felt exploitative in lesser hands. Nuns, guns, and exploitation, but with surprising depth!

John Carpenter lays out a story about an insurance investigator chasing a missing horror author—and then Carpenter turns the narrative into a diagnosis. What begins as a story about corporate calculus and a publicity headache mutates into a portrait of a contagion that influences the audience, illustrating how ideas crawl under the skin and the terrifying possibility that authorship is less about who writes and more about who believes. If the earlier entries in Carpenter’s ‘Apocalypse Trilogy’ (THE THING and PRINCE OF DARKNESS) toy with impending doom, this one grins, hands you a paperback, and dares you to read it aloud.

Caiden (Caleb Alexander Smith) wants to get away, start fresh, be someone better (or at least someone). The city is Los Angeles, full of promise and rough edges. What he doesn’t expect is that the very thing that could elevate him to the next level — his face (and physique) — will drag him into a quagmire of fraud, danger, and identity erosion.