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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?

DOWN CEMETERY ROAD is like a lingering echo — soft, deliberate, and full of buried truths that refuse to stay hidden. Apple TV+ continues its fascination with morally complex thrillers by adapting Mick Herron’s debut novel, turning the sleepy streets of Oxford into a stage for obsession, guilt, and reckoning. It’s something slower and heavier — a meditation disguised as a mystery.

In BROADWAY BOOKS: THE TIPPING POINT, writer-director Carianne King transforms the crumbling foundations of retail culture into the setting for one of the most self-aware and quietly hilarious pilots of the year. Set in a Manhattan bookstore caught between gentrification and extinction, it captures that unmistakable New York energy where hope and futility share the same shelf. It’s a series born from the trenches of part-time jobs, artistic compromise, and that singular mix of intellectual pride and exhaustion familiar to anyone who’s ever spent a paycheck on coffee and a book instead of rent.

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.