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Stealing bronze statues of national heroes probably isn't the career path most parents envision for their children, but Malina and Viktor don't have many options. In SISTER BROTHER MANHOLE COVER, writer-director Milcho Manchevski introduces two siblings surviving on the outskirts of Macedonia, where nearly everything has a price, compassion is increasingly difficult to find, and the people responsible for maintaining some sense of social order aren't necessarily interested in helping anyone. It's an unusual mixture of crime, dark comedy, family drama, and social commentary that finds considerable humor in some pretty miserable circumstances. Thankfully, Manchevski understands that making audiences laugh at an absurd situation doesn't require making light of the people trapped inside it.

Taking LSD with someone you've just met sounds like a formula for either an amazing or horrible first date. It’s definitely one way to see how well two people handle the unexpected. Most of us would settle for a few drinks, some awkward conversation, and the occasional silence as we try to decide whether there's any chemistry. The women in THE FIRST DATE have something less ordinary in mind. Writers/directors Will Crouse and Ashley Crowe's fifteen-minute romantic comedy follows an encounter at a bar and the decision to spend the first evening together experimenting with psychedelics. It's an unusual starting point for a romance, especially when getting to know someone becomes considerably more complicated once reality starts acting off...

I understand collecting things that other people might consider worthless (trust me, I had used STAR WARS pizza boxes as part of my collection in the past). I've spent enough money on movies to know how ridiculous a hobby can look from the outside, but even I struggle to wrap my head around someone paying thousands of dollars for an old pair of jeans. That obsession drives Eugene Kotlyarenko's VINTAGE VIOLENCE, which follows a livestreamer who discovers that the right vintage denim could make him a fortune. Unfortunately for him, he's hardly the only person interested in getting rich, and what starts as an opportunity for easy money quickly becomes a much more dangerous adventure.

From the start, GALICIA! feels familiar in some ways. Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg arrive in Spain with a camera, visit friends working at a winery, drink, wander around, and record the moments that normally end up forgotten somewhere in the ether. That’s so important here, because the film needs us to settle into the idea that we’re simply watching people document a trip, before it starts asking what those images would mean if nobody were left to return home to.

The traditional Western prepares us for a showdown. Someone takes the land, somebody refuses to move, guns come out, and sooner or later the dispute gets settled in the dirt. Writer-director Natalie Schwan uses those expectations to her advantage in LAST STAND AT BUTTE CITY, a 17-minute Western that initially looks ready to send an aging rancher into battle against the railroad before gradually revealing that the confrontation she has spent decades avoiding is much more personal.

There’s something immediately funny about gathering several privileged Los Angeles women around wine, cheese and a pelvic floor guru, then slowly discovering that nobody in the room is nearly as relaxed as the decor suggests. FLOORED takes that contradiction and runs with it for ten increasingly strange minutes, using wellness culture as a doorway into anger buried beneath motherhood, marriage, aging, and the expectation that everyone should still look perfectly composed while dealing with it all.

The most interesting thing about ON GUARD is that there’s an imbalance to the duel before anyone raises their saber. No, this isn’t a STAR WARS short. Taylor thinks he’s there to fence, while Jaime seems to believe she’s there to settle something much more important, and that gives the short an exploration of tension to focus on. One person sees competition as something that ends when the score is settled, while the other has tied so much of herself to winning that the distinction between sport and self-worth has nearly disappeared.

It’s one thing to make a documentary about another person, but when you end up pointing a camera at your own family, it comes with a different kind of responsibility. Director Joaquim Adrià Pujol explores this through MÀQUINA, a documentary that gets remarkably close to people he knows; he doesn't pretend that proximity makes him objective. His father, Xavi Pujol Berlanga, and brother, Marcel Enric Pujol, aren't subjects he discovered while making a film. Their addictions, histories, and complicated relationships are part of Joaquim’s life, and his place behind the camera never completely separates him from what is happening in front of it.

Nostalgia has a nasty habit of showing us only the parts we miss. LOVE SONG builds romantic conflict around that idea, putting a married father face-to-face with a woman connected to another version of his life, then refusing to make a decision as simple as choosing between two people. Mathieu isn't only remembering Belinda when she pops back into his life. He's remembering who he was when she was part of his life, and that gives this 29-minute short considerably more to think about than you’d expect.

There’s something painful about returning to a place tied so closely to a perfectly happy memory and realizing it no longer exists the way you remember it. HEADING TO THE EAST builds around that as Jinna and Alex search for the desert oasis where they once fell in love, only to find that time has changed more than the landscape. Their relationship is already slipping away before they make the trip, and the journey becomes less about saving it and more about confronting what remains.

Silence does much of the talking in BORDER, and that choice tells us almost everything we need to know about the world Ah Biao has created. These are men accustomed to swallowing whatever they're feeling, going to work, coming home, and accepting that tomorrow probably won't be much different. The question hanging over the film isn't simply what might finally break that routine, but what happens when a person who's barely been living suddenly finds something worth chasing.

A statue of a saint can represent faith, memory, beauty, history, money, or absolutely nothing depending on who's holding it. SANTS takes advantage of that contradiction, placing sacred objects inside a story about a woman confronting something religion, money, and desperate action are all ultimately powerless to stop: her mother's impending death.

GHOST SONG spends almost the entire runtime of the black-and-white version at the San Sebastián Film Festival denying itself the ability to use color to its advantage, turning Hamburg, young love, dreams, and death into shades of black, white, and gray. Somehow, that restriction gives Fatih Akin's supernatural romance much of its personality, making a story that can feel a little too familiar at times look like something pulled from a memory that's already starting to fade. It’s weird, because I didn’t know what to expect going into this (as I try to do with most films), and what I came out the other side with was a gorgeous journey into the afterlife through contrast, both visually and literally.

I don’t normally include trigger warnings at the beginning of my reviews, but CUTE deals directly with sexual attraction toward a child, sexualized age-regression, and other uncomfortable material involving minors. I want to make clear that the film itself does not place any children in harm’s way, but the subjects it explores could still be extremely difficult or upsetting for some viewers, so I think it’s important to say that upfront. The title CUTE is ultimately less a description and more an accusation. We traditionally associate the word with harmless things. Children, stuffed animals, oversized eyes, soft colors, tiny things, and anything designed to provoke affection before we've had time to think about why. Director/co-writer Marlene Emilie Lyngstad takes that and turns it inside out, building a story around adults whose relationships with childhood, innocence, protection, and desire have become tangled in deeply uncomfortable ways.

For a while, THE HERETIKS feels like the most dangerous Disney Channel Halloween special that never existed. There are witches, kids sneaking around, fun Halloween costumes, old folklore, forbidden magic, and enough edgy teenage angst that something like HOCUS POCUS doesn’t feel like a ridiculous comparison. Then director Gregg Bishop flips a switch, the violence starts flowing, and the movie makes it very clear that nobody promised these kids a family-friendly adventure. That turn is where THE HERETIKS really won me over.

A thirteen-year-old can understand that the adults around him are angry long before he understands why. He can see people choosing sides, hear how families talk about one another change, and recognize when someone he cares about suddenly becomes someone he’s apparently supposed to avoid. WILL YOU STILL BE MY FRIEND builds itself around that uncomfortable space, where childhood feelings are still relatively uncomplicated, but the world surrounding them absolutely isn’t.

Caro returns to Venezuela after her father dies; the family property needs to be sold, and she’s traveled from Italy to deal with it. She discovers that Sonia, a former employee, is living in the house with her young son, Maiko, and has allowed other people to live throughout the estate.

People become unusually talkative in times of grief. They reach for reassurance, advice, optimism, or a story about someone else, often because sitting with another person’s pain feels unbearable. STILL LIFE understands how those attempts at comfort can leave a grieving person feeling even more alone, especially when everyone around them seems desperate to steer the conversation toward something simpler.

There’s an undeniable ache that comes from realizing your life worked out, only to wonder how part of you vanished. WELCOME TO THE FISHBOWL builds from that uncomfortable middle space, where maturity has already handed out responsibilities, compromises, habits, resentments, and routines, but ambition hasn’t gone quiet. The film isn’t about a woman trying to become young. It’s about a woman trying to remember what wanting something for herself felt like before everyone else’s needs drowned it out.

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.

This short film opens with a feeling more than a premise. Something is off, even before the situation takes shape. The setting is simple, the dynamic familiar, but there’s an immediate sense that this isn’t going to play out predictably. THE TRICK doesn’t spend time establishing comfort; it starts from a place of quiet tension and builds from there. This feels more like a thought in a larger journey than a complete story, but it’s that thought that’s so powerful that it works on its own.

This film doesn’t ease you into the story. There’s no warm-up, no introduction to the family dynamics, no time to settle into who these people are before everything starts to collapse. BIRTHDAY BOY throws you into a situation that already feels unstable, then keeps tightening the pressure without offering relief. The result isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s recognizably uncomfortable in a way that sticks.

There’s a difference between a documentary that informs and one that carries a sense of urgency. OUR PLANET, THE PEOPLE, MY BLOOD doesn’t ease you into the subject. It arrives with the weight of years behind it, shaped by testimony, persistence, and a reality that never went away; it was just ignored. From the opening stretch, there’s a clear understanding that this isn’t just about revisiting history. It’s about confronting something that’s still happening.

Bond, Chet Bond… cue the music. Or more accurately, cue the version of a spy thriller where the world’s fate somehow ends up resting in the hands of an underqualified nepo baby stumbling through missions he shouldn’t survive. CHET BOND: LICENSE TO CHILL understands that the funniest thing is the gap between how Chet sees himself and how everyone else sees him. He moves through the world with confidence, convinced he belongs in the same conversation as legendary secret agents, while the people around him are usually just trying to contain the damage. The mockumentary setup only makes that disconnect funnier, turning every failure at looking cool into something increasingly awkward, chaotic, and weirdly endearing.

What makes BEING OLA connect so strongly is how naturally it allows Ola Henningsen to exist on screen. The film never frames him as a lesson, a symbol, or someone whose value depends on inspiring the audience. He’s simply presented as himself, funny, thoughtful, social, uncertain at times, and deeply aware of the world around him. That honesty gives the documentary a warmth that never feels forced.