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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.

SURVIVING EARTH has such an interesting premise, offering up an irresistible feast to anyone fascinated by prehistoric life, mass extinction, climate turmoil, and the long, brutal accident of existence. NBC’s docuseries looks back across hundreds of millions of years, using CGI to recreate vanished worlds and creatures that lived through environmental disasters so extreme they reshaped the future of life itself. The ambition is easy to appreciate. This is a series about fire, rain, collapse, adaptation, and the persistence of life on a planet that has repeatedly tried to wipe the board clean. The first two episodes offer enough scale and accessible storytelling to make the series watchable, even if the execution doesn’t always match the concept's scale.

I’ve been a fan of this franchise from day one. Wes Craven’s satirical brainchild of the genre he cemented was so far ahead of its time that it even allowed for a parody of itself to exist with the SCARY MOVIE franchise (which was SCREAM’s original title). Unfortunately, SCREAM 7 is the point at which affection for the franchise does more work than the movie itself. That’s a rough thing to admit about a series that has meant so much to modern horror, especially one built on being smarter and more self-aware than the films it was taking a knife and you slit 'em from groin to sternum. For years, even the weaker SCREAM entries had some reason to exist. They could struggle on their own, repeat themselves, or lean too hard on familiarity, but there was usually an angle, a target, or a new anxiety worth poking at. This one feels different. SCREAM 7 doesn’t feel like a franchise trying to find a new reason to survive. It feels like a franchise trying to convince itself that survival is enough.

IT’S DOROTHY! understands that Dorothy Gale stopped belonging to a single book, a single movie, an actress, or a single generation a long time ago. She began as a girl from Kansas trying to get home, but over the last 125 years, she’s become something far more resilient. For some people, she’s a childhood memory. For others, she’s Judy Garland wrapped in gingham, talent, and the depths of cruelty that Hollywood offered at the time. For others, she’s the icon THE WIZ, RETURN TO OZ, WICKED, stage productions, television specials, queer-coded legends, Black cultural reclamation, or proof that even the most familiar stories can keep opening new doors when different people are allowed to claim them.

RECONSTRUCTING CHARLIE understands that life-altering news doesn’t always come about in a quiet, graceful package. Sometimes it interrupts the version of yourself you were finally starting to like. Sometimes it shows up right when you’ve convinced yourself the hardest chapter has already ended. Lara Everly’s short film takes that idea of ruthless timing and turns it into something funny, uncomfortable, tender, and defiantly alive, following a woman whose post-divorce reinvention is cut short by a breast cancer diagnosis that forces her to renegotiate her relationship with her body, her family, and the story she’s been trying to tell herself.

PROTECTOR knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be, which makes its weaker choices more frustrating, but it’s also why I give the film the credit it gets. This is a lean, violent, rescue-driven action thriller built around a mother with military training, a kidnapped daughter, and a criminal network begging to be torn apart. That idea needs pressure, clarity, momentum, and a lead who can sell physical punishment without turning the whole thing into parody. Milla Jovovich handles her side of that bargain far better than the movie handles its own.

MEXICANAMERICAN understands that family history often disappears into plain sight. It’s there in tapes, half-remembered stories, jokes children didn’t understand, silences nobody knew how to question, and sacrifices that became normal because someone had to keep going. Eddie Sánchez’s debut documentary begins from that kind of distance, the space between immigrant parents who lived the cost of migration and first-generation children who benefited from it without always knowing what had been paid. The film doesn’t approach that with the expected form of accusation. It approaches it with regret, curiosity, love, and the aching realization that waiting too long to ask questions can become its own kind of loss.

NEVER CHANGE! takes an instantly recognizable nightmare, the fear of being forced back into high school, and turns it into a strange, surprisingly pointed, yet also an undeniable 90s throwback comedy about people who never got the ending they thought they were owed. The setup is ridiculous. In 2008, the graduating class of North Meadows High School had its senior year cut short by a disastrous tornado. Now those former students are in their mid-30s, with jobs, families, regrets, stalled relationships, faded ambitions, and emotional baggage they’ve had years to pretend they outgrew. Then they’re ordered to return home and finish high school once and for all.

I had no clue what to expect going into this, and I’m still not entirely sure I get it all. There are films built to persuade audiences, films built to entertain them, and films built to make viewers feel trapped inside somebody else’s emotional state for two and a half hours. YES belongs firmly in that last category. Nadav Lapid doesn’t approach this story like a careful political dramatist trying to guide audiences toward a specific conclusion. He attacks the screen with panic, rebellion, exhaustion, rage, absurdity, music, screaming, and sensory overload until the entire movie starts feeling less like a traditional narrative and more like a prolonged spiritual collapse caught on camera.

Most vampire stories still gravitate toward some level of elegance. Even when the creatures themselves become monstrous, there’s usually some trace of gothic romanticism lingering around them. Castles. Velvet. Seduction. Wealth. BLOOD & RUST walks in the complete opposite direction. This is a vampire movie that smells like stale coffee, old fryer grease, cigarette smoke trapped in your jacket, and abandoned American industry. Its monsters don’t rise from aristocratic shadows. They crawl through the dying veins of a forgotten Ohio town where everybody already looks drained before the vampires even arrive.

There’s something deeply unnerving about a documentary that refuses to reassure the viewer. SUBURBAN FURY never gives the comfort of certainty, conclusions, or emotional closure. Instead, Robinson Devor builds the entire film around instability, specifically the instability of memory, self-mythology, political identity, and personal truth. The result feels less like a conventional documentary and more like sitting across from someone who may be confessing, performing, manipulating, rationalizing, or all four simultaneously.

Every friend group worth having has that person who insists the night isn't over yet. The bar is closing, everyone's exhausted, half the group wants to leave, and somehow they still manage to convince everybody that the next stop is where the real fun starts. FIND YOUR FRIENDS feels like an entire movie built around that moment. It captures the intoxicating rush of chasing one more adventure long after common sense has packed up and gone home, then follows that vibe into increasingly dangerous territory until the line between a party and a nightmare completely disappears.

There’s a point early in EASY GIRL where the atmosphere feels almost suspiciously carefree. Two young women drift through bars, apartments, and strangers’ bedrooms with the kind of reckless abandon movies usually package as liberation. The nights are loud, the clothes are flamboyant, and the consequences seem temporarily buried beneath cigarettes, glitter, flirtation, and alcohol. Writer/director Hille Norden lets that illusion breathe just long enough for viewers to settle in before slowly exposing how unstable the foundation underneath it really is.

Gabi Asfour, Angela Donhauser, and Adi Gil have spent decades building a fashion label that refuses to follow the rules, and THREEASFOUR: FULL CIRCLE understands that the most interesting part of their story has never been the clothes alone. Sean Ono Lennon and Brian C. González use the designers' work as an entry point into something much larger, exploring friendship, artistic conviction, cultural identity, and the challenge of remaining true to a creative vision. The world constantly pressures artists to become more marketable, more accessible, and easier to categorize. The result is a documentary that values the people behind the designs as much as the designs themselves.