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This film does something unique, shining a spotlight on Bunny Yeager—model, photographer, entrepreneur—whose fingerprints are all over mid-century American pop culture even if her name isn’t. Rather than building a biography, the documentary assembles a persuasive, steadily layered case: Yeager’s images didn’t just decorate the era; they helped to create it. The work popularized the bikini and elevated the image of Bettie Page. It molded the 1950s pin-up into something both sharper, nudging a country inching toward social change to confront who controls the image of women and why.

In just nineteen minutes, RIPE achieves what many features spend an hour or two chasing: a world thick with history and spiritual resonance. Writer-director Solara Thanh Bình Đặng roots the film in the Mekong Delta, an ecological crossroads where fertility and precarity intertwine. The story follows a young woman faced with a decision that has shaped generations before her—whether to accept an arranged marriage for the sake of her family’s farm. What could read as a familiar coming-of-age negotiation is refracted through a lens, where the land itself and unseen forces press against her choice.

There’s an instant warmth to this kind of studio-era comedy: a family tossed into gentle disorder, a front door that never stops opening, and a romance that blooms because everyone tries to do the right thing at the wrong time. DEAR RUTH is built on a premise with generous payoffs. A teenage idealist has been writing morale-boosting letters to a soldier overseas and signing them with her older sister’s name. When the soldier shows up on leave expecting to meet his sweetheart, the household scrambles to sustain the illusion, protect the sister’s very real engagement, and keep Sunday dinner from curdling into scandal.

Christopher Leone’s CODE 3 aims for something trickier than a straight “one wild night” rollick: it wants to show the volatility, indignity, and strange tenderness of EMS work without sanding off the splinters. The movie follows Randy (Rainn Wilson), a paramedic who’s done—done with panic attacks, done with a system that bleeds him dry, done with the endless triage of other people’s worst days. He’s training his replacement, Jessica (Aimee Carrero), over a single 24-hour shift, while his partner Mike (Lil Rel Howery) keeps the unit stitched together with wisdom and bone-dry asides. The premise is familiar—one last ride—but the execution is keyed to lived-in specifics, the kind of details you don’t get unless someone has lived that life.

THE QUIREBOYS – LIVE AT ROCKPALAST is less a live album and more a time capsule. Split across two concerts—one from 1990 at Cologne’s Live Music Hall and another from 2007 at Bonn’s Crossroads Festival—the release captures not just a band but an entire attitude that defined British sleaze rock. By presenting both eras back-to-back, the package highlights the hunger of a band still climbing and the seasoned grit of musicians who had weathered the ups and downs of two decades in the industry.

Venice has always been a city of contradictions, a place where opulent façades conceal elaborate secrets. It feels fitting then that Ilya Khrzhanovsky brought his sprawling, controversial DAU project here under the banner of The Quantum Effect. Staged at the San Marco Art Center, the exhibition reframes the long-mythologized DAU experiment by presenting unseen “physics” reels—documented debates between real scientists dropped into meticulously recreated conditions of Lev Landau’s Soviet laboratory—while pairing them with restored screenings of three completed works: FOUR, DAU. NATASHA, and DAU. DEGENERATION.

At first glance, BAND ON THE RUN looks like a straightforward indie road movie: a band chasing a shot at South by Southwest, a van full of tension, and the promise of a rival group waiting to clash along the way. But what gives the film its shape isn’t just the music or the road-trip formula. It’s the story of a chronically ill father insisting on being part of the ride and his son, who struggles to balance his obligations with his ambitions. That generational conflict, set against the very specific backdrop of Detroit’s late-90s garage rock revival, makes the film more than just a string of tour-bus anecdotes.

Valentyn Vasyanovych has built his reputation on quiet yet devastating portraits of Ukraine in crisis, from the haunting near-future visions of ATLANTIS to the clinical, unflinching gaze of REFLECTION. With TO THE VICTORY! he continues this trajectory, shifting from war itself to the space after it ends. The result is a film that resists pride, lingering instead on the emptiness that follows survival.

Directed by Anthony D’Ambrosio and shot on location in Poland, the film dramatizes the true story of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Catholic priest who volunteered to take the place of another man condemned to die in Auschwitz in 1941. While Kolbe’s sacrifice has long been told, the film expands the story, exploring the nine companions with whom he shared a cell and the fragile bonds forged in the most harrowing circumstances.

The 1980s were a fertile ground for detective shows on television. Yet amid the sea of trench coats and car chases, SPENSER: FOR HIRE distinguished itself with a mix of toughness and refinement. Based on Robert B. Parker’s novels, the series followed private investigator Spenser (Robert Urich), a former cop whose fists were as quick as his wit, and who navigated Boston’s underworld with intelligence, honor, and a surprising dose of introspection.

Weddings are often treated on screen as moments of release, filled with laughter, romance, and chaos that eventually resolve into a neat bow. Philippe Falardeau’s LOVELY DAY has no interest in indulging that fantasy. Instead, it asks what happens when the very rituals meant to unify become suffocating, when the perfect day amplifies every crack already running through a family. What emerges is a sharp and surprisingly deep dramedy that balances humor with a painful honesty, one that explores in a structure as fractured and restless as its protagonist’s mind.

Gianni Di Gregorio has built a career on capturing the overlooked moments of aging with humor and heart, and DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON’T may be one of his most direct reflections on how fragile stability can be. At 75, the director not only helms the film but stars in it as the retired professor whose days are disrupted by forces outside his control. What starts as a story of independence soon unravels into something messier, funnier, and far more affecting — a reminder that no matter how much we try to shield ourselves, family has a way of pulling us back into the mess of the real world.

TIFF often thrives on scale—gala premieres, sweeping epics, star-driven dramas. But every so often, it’s the smallest entry in the lineup that makes the strongest impact. With a runtime of just over three and a half minutes, MARRIAGINALIA holds the title of the festival’s shortest short, and yet it hardly feels like it. In fact, it plays like a concentrated dose of surreal comedy, twisting the rituals of marriage into something at once distorted and affectionate.

The late 1970s marked a turning point in Japanese cinema. “Movie mogul” Haruki Kadokawa, eager to redefine how movies were made and sold, pushed the idea of the homegrown blockbuster—spectacle, international stars, and a marketing blitz that rivaled Hollywood. PROOF OF THE MAN, directed by Jun’ya Satō and adapted from Seiichi Morimura’s best-selling novel, arrived in 1977 as one of those tentpoles. A murder mystery on its surface, the film also serves as an excavation of postwar trauma, posing uncomfortable questions about race, identity, and the lasting scars of occupation.

GOOD LUCK TO ME is a brief film, but its briefness doesn’t diminish its weight. Directed by Maya Ahmed and co-written by Heather Bayles and Timothy J. Cox, the short compresses the complexity of a 20-year marriage into 10 minutes. It doesn’t need dramatic fireworks or a sweeping score to make its point. Instead, it relies on awkward pauses, strained civility, and the lived-in weariness of two people who once promised forever but now can’t find common ground.