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WHEN FALL IS COMING makes it clear that home life can be a costume. François Ozon sets the table with warmth and ritual—country air, routine, a grandmother fussing over lunch—then lets a single, pointed decision unshackle everything we know. The incident isn’t loud; it doesn’t have to be. In this house, gestures carry more weight than speeches. That’s the film’s core: a story of love and control disguised as everyday caretaking, with a grandmother who tells herself she’s fixing what years of hurt have broken.

THERE WAS, THERE WAS NOT stands as both an act of storytelling and an act of preservation. Emily Mkrtichian’s debut feature documentary explores a homeland under siege and the women who endure within it, weaving myth and reality together until the line between the two becomes impossible to separate. By centering four Armenian women living in Artsakh, the film transforms geopolitical headlines into lived truths. A chronicle of resilience, weaving the fabric of a community through the daily acts of survival, work, and resistance.

The heartbeat of this story is small, human, and resilient. FAIRYLAND traces a father-daughter bond through years when San Francisco felt like a home for reinvention—first euphoric, then devastating. It refuses melodrama and loud marks, favoring the fragile honesty of two people figuring each other out in real time. It isn’t trying to be a grand statement so much as a lived-in memory: the awkwardness of new routines, the quiet stubbornness of love, the mistakes we defend until we can’t anymore.

Dave Chappelle’s KILLIN’ THEM SOFTLY is the rare kind of comedy special that manages to feel both of its time and timeless. Shot in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Theatre back in 2000, this HBO debut didn’t just capture a rising star — it proclaimed a cultural force. Twenty-five years later, Warner Bros. Discovery is marking its legacy with a new DVD release, offering fans an opportunity to revisit the hour that catapulted Chappelle from a cult comic to a household name.

For a generation that grew up with Vee in animated form, VAMPIRINA: TEENAGE VAMPIRE isn’t just a new series—it’s a graduation, a chance to see a beloved character wrestle with bigger stages, bigger secrets, and the universal growing pains of finding yourself. VAMPIRINA: TEENAGE VAMPIRE takes the beloved character, swaps animation for live action, and keeps the beating heart (or not beating in Vee’s case)—music, friendship, and the struggle of fitting in—front and center. A tween vampire leaves Transylvania for a performing-arts boarding school in the human world, where she has to juggle secret identity anxieties, artistic ambition, a loving (and protective) family, and an overzealous ghost chaperone who complicates even the simplest moments. The fact that this is the character’s first live-action portrayal gives it a built-in curiosity factor, and the two episodes I screened suggest a series designed to balance hijinks with a serialized emotional arc.

SPAWN lives in the peculiar sweet spot where a bold comic-book world collided with late-’90s studio filmmaking. You can feel the era in every choice: aggressive CG, a hard-edged soundtrack, and a go-for-broke villain performance that threatens to hijack the movie. Yet beneath the glaze and scorched-earth aesthetic, there’s a sharp hook—a tragic antihero whose pain is as compelling as his power. That core keeps the film from toppling under its own extravagance and makes a modern revisit surprisingly enjoyable, even while the seams show.

COUNTED OUT makes a simple, potent claim: in a world arranged by code, statistics, and algorithms, math is a language of power—and literacy in that language affects who gets hired, who gets heard, and who gets a real say. Vicki Abeles builds that claim into a focused documentary that treats mathematics not as a test to pass but as a civic tool. The result is engaging, unusually clear, and sincere about the shame and anxiety that many people still carry from their school days.

AKASHI is a story that wears its duality on its sleeve—bridging continents, generations, and emotional timelines. Director Mayumi Yoshida transforms her award-winning short into a deeply personal feature, one that explores grief, romance, and the weight of secrets handed down through family. From the outset, this isn’t framed as just a homecoming drama but as a reckoning with identity. Kana (played by Yoshida herself), a struggling artist who’s been living in Vancouver, returns to Tokyo for her grandmother’s funeral. In that journey back, the film opens layers of memory and buried truths that ripple through the lives of those left behind.

THE ART OF ADVENTURE tracks an irresistible premise with a simple confidence: two curious young Canadians—painter Robert Bateman and biologist Bristol Foster—set off in 1957 in a suped up Land Rover nicknamed “Grizzly Torque,” roaming across Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia with a sketchbook, a 16mm camera, and more nerve than budget. Director Alison Reid doesn’t just recount where they went; she shows how a road trip crystallized into a lifelong mission, translating awe into action. The result is a buoyant, clear-eyed documentary that feels like a road movie first and a career retrospective second. That order matters—the film offers a lived experience, then threads it to legacy.

UNDELETABLE is the rare short that understands how comedy and pain are often the same sound at different volumes. It traps a grieving daughter and lets every misstep, every backspace that isn’t possible, every awkward correction, reveal a life cracking in real time. In seven minutes, the film pulls off an emotional high-wire act: it’s funny because you recognize the panic of leaving a message you can’t edit. It’s devastating because the stakes are as high as they could be. That double exposure—humor laid directly over heartbreak—is the film’s engine.

SYNTHESIZE ME proves that fifteen minutes can be expansive when emotion and metaphor are intertwined. Dutch-Indonesian filmmaker Bear Damen crafts a deeply personal story framed within the world of a grieving family. Set in a town near Mexico City in the late 80s, the film channels the instability of its setting into a potent metaphor for human relationships. At its heart is Violeta, a teenager played with energy and quiet sorrow by Ivana Plantier, who uses her late mother’s neglected synthesizers as a lifeline to memory.

There’s something timeless about the idea of a high school newspaper—enthusiastic teenagers chasing stories that feel monumental within their own microcosm. DIRTY BOOKS takes that premise and infuses it with both humor and a commentary on how journalism and ethics collide, even at the most novice level. This 16-minute short film demonstrates that with the right execution, small stories can have just as much impact as sprawling feature films.

A DIWALI DILEMMA begins in the fluorescently-lit cubicles of a workplace that doesn’t celebrate diversity so much as commodify it. Mala, an overworked employee, is compelled by her toxic boss to organize a Diwali party as a superficial gesture of inclusion. Already running on fumes, she numbs herself with too many drinks and collapses. What follows is a night of reckoning, guided by three mentors from her past, who force her to confront how far she has drifted from the dreams she once had of becoming.

Few cult studios embodied the DIY ethos of the VHS era quite like Full Moon Features. Nowhere is that clearer than in THE DOLLMAN TOYBOX: DOLLMAN X DEMONIC TOYS COLLECTION, a five-disc, eight-film set from 101 Films’ Black Label line. For the first time, the complete run of crossover madness — from Tim Thomerson’s tiny space cop to Baby Oopsie’s foul-mouthed reign of terror — has been gathered in one package. The result is less about perfection and more about persistence: a living archive of what happens when imagination refuses to die, even under the tightest budgets.

MONSTERS WITHIN wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s a character-driven drama with thriller elements about a veteran, Luke Wolf, who returns home and discovers that the hardest battles aren’t fought overseas, but inside the mind and within the relationships he’s neglected. The film’s core is the bond between Luke and his sister, Elle—played by writer-director-star Devin Montgomery and his real-life sister, Daniella Montgomery—which lends the story an authenticity that is palpable in the quiet moments. That choice grounds the film’s broader themes and keeps the focus where it belongs: on care, responsibility, and the complex path from avoidance to accountability.

DOGTOOTH remains one of the most startling debuts in modern cinema, the film that first presented Yorgos Lanthimos as a director unafraid of discomfort, ambiguity, and provocation. Now restored and released in 4K by Kino Lorber with director-supervised grading and remastered audio, it arrives with sharper edges than ever. Though released in 2009, its disturbing questions about control and manufactured truth still feel contemporary.

SHE LOVED BLOSSOMS MORE arrives as one of the most unusual films that I’ve seen lately, and that’s saying something. This feature resists easy categorization and pushes firmly into the terrain of the Greek “weirdwave.” Directed by Yannis Veslemes, the film fuses grief, science fiction, surreal horror, and an undercurrent of bleak comedy into a deliberately confounding story of three brothers attempting to undo the permanent. What begins as a strange family drama quickly morphs into something far less stable — a feverish meditation on memory and mourning where logic crumbles as easily as the flowers that line its title.

Dan Curtis’ influence on horror television in the 1970s can’t be overstated. Having already carved a space for Gothic melodrama with DARK SHADOWS and expanded into cult TV films like THE NIGHT STALKER, he continued to explore eerie stories through ABC’s Wide World Mystery. The Kino Lorber collection LATE-NIGHT MYSTERIES rescues four of those productions—SHADOW OF FEAR, THE INVASION OF CAROL ENDERS, COME DIE WITH ME, and NIGHTMARE AT 43 HILLCREST—and brings them into HD for the first time. What emerges is a window into a lost era, when horror was filtered through the constraints of broadcast television, yet often found inventive ways to unsettle the audience.

KILLING FAITH takes the bones of a classic western and stitches them together with something far more haunting: a sense that the land itself has been cursed. Set in the Arizona territory of 1849, the film drops us into a plague-scarred desert where superstition and science are at war. On one side, a grieving doctor numbed by ether, clinging to what little logic he has left; on the other, a mother convinced her daughter’s strange affliction is nothing less than demonic. Between them lies the question the movie keeps circling: is the evil real, or are we simply desperate to believe in it?

FREAKED is the kind of movie that shouldn’t work—and somehow it does. It’s a gleefully obnoxious corporate satire wrapped in a carnival of latex, clay, and rubber, where every frame is crammed with jokes that flow from absurd wordplay and blink-and-you-miss-it visual gags. What gives it staying power isn’t just the noise; it’s the unity of its attitude. This thing is committed. The film’s whole ethos is “too much,” and that maximalism becomes the point.

Few horror films from the early 1980s blur the line between fantasy, industry satire, and straight-up slasher excess quite like THE LAST HORROR FILM. Directed by David Winters, it reunites Joe Spinell and Caroline Munro, who had already left a mark together in MANIAC, but here the dynamic takes on a different tone. Rather than the oppressive grimness, this one turns Cannes itself into a stage for obsession, paranoia, and guerrilla-style filmmaking that still feels chaotic decades later.

THE ICE TOWER doesn’t open with chaos. Instead, it settles into a quiet, unsettling rhythm that seeps under the skin. Set in the 1970s, the story follows Jeanne, a runaway orphan who stumbles into a film studio. There, she discovers a production of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’ in progress and falls under the spell of Cristina, the star playing the role. What begins as fascination quickly deepens into something more dangerous, with Jeanne caught in a web of glamour, authority, and quiet menace.

Stelvio Massi’s THE .44 SPECIALIST (originally released in Italy as Mark colpisce ancora, or Mark Strikes Again) lands in the heart of the Eurocrime boom of the 1970s, when gritty realism and relentless violence defined a whole generation of Italian cop thrillers. As the third entry in the “Mark” trilogy, it brings back Franco Gasparri’s Inspector Mark Patti for another dive into the murky intersection of crime, politics, and undercover policing. Kino Lorber’s 2025 Blu-ray release resurrects the film for a new audience, reminding us why these poliziotteschi films still pulse with raw energy decades later.

ALMOST HOME opens with an intensity that doesn’t come from gunfire or explosions but from the silence of a man’s haunted mind. At just 20 minutes, this short film confronts a reality that persists with you: the wars many veterans fight don’t end on foreign soil. Director Menhaj Huda and writer-performer Kamal Khan craft a deeply personal story that tackles identity, trauma, and community in ways that feel both universal and yet also specific.