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When a movie won’t explain itself, not in an attempt to be mysterious, but because it simply has too much going on, then what happens? THE VISITOR begins as if it assumes we already know how their world works, though those rules seem to be made up as it goes along. The film cares less about a focused story than about keeping us disoriented, and this dedication is at once its best quality and its biggest problem.

What happens when an action movie stops trying to make sense? KNOCK OFF decides to dive into the shallow end and challenge you to either give in to the craziness or just scratch your head and wonder what you’re watching, This isn’t a film that wants to let anyone get comfortable and acclimate to its world; it goes quickly, is loud, and piles on the absurdity with the confidence of a director who figures you’ll keep up or be left behind.

What happens when being loyal to your job begins to feel personal? That’s an interesting focus in AMERICAN YAKUZA. This movie appears to be a standard undercover police story, yet it frequently returns to a more complex emotional problem beneath the shooting. It’s a film more concerned with the gradual loss of being sure of things than with surprise or size, though it isn’t always able, or determined enough, to work out that idea fully.

There’s a specific kind of project that only exists because someone once made a joke about it, and then decades later decided to cash that joke in. MEL BROOKS’ SPACEBALLS: THE ANIMATED SERIES is exactly that. It’s not really a sequel anyone demanded (we’ll get that in 2027!), it isn’t an expansion of the lore that anyone needed, and it isn’t particularly interested in pretending otherwise. From the first moments on screen, the series feels less like a continuation of SPACEBALLS and more like a prolonged shrug that says, “Yeah, fine, you asked for more, here’s more.” That self-awareness ends up being both the show’s saving grace and I’d say what holds it back, but it knew exactly what it was.

What happens when misery won’t leave you, and the only thing the departed can grasp is revenge? GARDEN OF LOVE doesn’t approach this question with benevolence. It puts it in focus, then waits before ripping people apart. Olaf Ittenbach’s 2003 splatter film has long occupied a strange place among fans of extreme horror; some find it to be too much, while others accept it as operatic violence. Now, with Unearthed Films’ Blu-ray, it seems less like somebody letting themselves go, and more like a director deliberately getting better at what he does.

What happens when a society comes to think of crime not as something to be solved, but as something to be manipulated, a number to change? That’s the quiet question at the heart of CENSOR ADDICTION, and the film never lets it go. Michael Matteo Rossi’s near-future dystopian thriller, set in 2030, presents a world where a very powerful medical company deliberately causes trouble to profit, and then sells the idea of controlling things to the people. The idea isn’t presented delicately, and that’s absolutely intended.

What does it mean to try and find where you fit in your body, when the world is so keen to put you into a box, and when that box itself is being questioned? THE TALLEST DWARF is a documentary that begins with the filmmaker’s own doubts and doesn’t turn those doubts into something to be looked at. Julie Forrest Wyman doesn’t approach this topic as someone who has all of the answers, or as a director hoping for a straightforward idea to emerge from it. Rather, the film works through a series of questions and shows how identity can be formed, rejected, put off, or quietly changed by the medical profession, by what people generally believe, and even by kindness that says nothing.

What does it mean to live in a world that has already decided you’re not important? THE KEY is based around individuals who’ve managed to vanish, not by choice, but as the easiest way to get by in life. Paul G. Sportiello’s first feature film isn’t about showing off poverty or on the outside to make a point about morality. Rather, it depicts invisibility as something people learn, something handed down between those who come to realize that not being noticed is, at times, safer than being seen.

How big does a monster story have to become before it overcomes the individuals in their immediate vicinity? The second season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters arrives with a very definite goal: to be bigger, to go further, and to at last prove its right to be within the Monsterverse, not just adjacent to it. The first season was often a fairly down-to-earth drama about people who happened to be near these major events; the second season aims for direct impact. The result is more self-assured, more ambitious in its visuals, and sometimes a little bit awkward, yet also more satisfying when it remembers what made the show good in the first place.

What does it mean for the most well-known songwriter on earth to suddenly find himself without a band, without any support, and without any certainty that people still want to hear what he is doing? MAN ON THE RUN doesn’t attempt to cover The Beatles' story again, nor should it; we have multiple documentaries that have told that story. Here, we’re posed a tougher question: what happens when a legend has to demonstrate his worth from the beginning?

What do you do when the world around you feels like the very thing you’re attempting to get away from? TONY ODYSSEY begins with that problem embedded in its core; it’s rooted in the quite ordinary disappointment of a person, before the movie breaks apart, twists, and ultimately doesn’t bother to be polite or even make sense (and doesn’t need to). From the first scenes, Thales Banzai’s first film shows that this isn’t a story that wants your comfort, or to make things clear, or even to reassure you. It’s a film about being used up from deep inside, about the harm of not moving forward, and about the idea that, perhaps, past the rules, there’s some way to get out.

What happens when trying to be relevant means facing up to those you’ve let down? K-POPS! presents itself as bright, musical, though its real heart is more subdued than you’d think. With the energy of a K-pop contest and the fun of a stranger-in-a-strange-land idea, it is a tale of a man who confused what he wanted to do with what his purpose was, and is now at last made to deal with the difference. Anderson .Paak’s first time directing doesn’t attempt to change the genre.

What happens when a television series grows so large that it begins to rewrite public memory, and not just entertain? PEAKY BLINDERS: THE REAL STORY focuses in part on offering an answer to that question, positioning itself less as an extension of a global franchise and more as a corrective lens, one that slows the momentum of cultural obsession long enough to ask what’s been gained, lost, and distorted along the way.

When power, not affection, is the first thing to shape it, what does love look like? DREAMS starts like a romance, but doesn’t want to ease anyone in. Right from the beginning, between Jennifer McCarthy (Jessica Chastain) and Fernando Rodríguez (Isaac Hernández), there’s a lack of balance, not in obvious spitefulness, but in quiet domination. Writer/director Michel Franco isn’t making a big, cross-cultural love story; he’s making a deal which, little by little, shows what it’s about.

THRESHOLD doesn’t begin with triumph; it begins with showing what proximity is. The film follows Jessie Diggins throughout a single World Cup season. It embeds its focus there, not as a highlight reel or a retrospective, but as a record of the daily pressure, physical demand, and psychological strain. From its opening stretch, the documentary makes clear it isn’t interested in building a myth or reframing success. It wants to see what happens when the mechanisms that once drove greatness begin to cause harm.