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There’s something fitting about a director closing out a career by returning to the genre that shaped so much of his legacy, and that’s exactly what happens with Howard Hawks’ RIO LOBO. This film emerged in an era where Westerns were undergoing rapid transformation, yet it approaches the frontier with the same hand that Hawks had relied on for decades. That tension between a filmmaker’s identity and a genre’s evolution becomes the backbone of the film’s character.

FRIGHTMARE wastes no time letting its terms be known. Instead of the usual slasher theatrics or exaggerated shocks that defined many horror films of its era, this one takes a quieter, meaner route. It opens with a straightforward premise: a woman once deemed criminally insane for cannibalistic murders is released back into society, ready to live freely with her devoted husband on a secluded farm. The horror isn’t built around jump scares or abrupt intrusions; it’s built around the realization that the system has absolutely misjudged her. The threat is not something that creeps through the woods or lurks beneath the floorboards. The danger sits in a farmhouse, reading tarot cards with a smile and an appetite she never lost.

The first thing that strikes you about BULLETS AND BLUEBERRIES is how deliberately it avoids dramatizing the Holocaust. The documentary keeps its gaze fixed on something just as unsettling: the photographs taken by the murderers themselves. By framing the narrative around these images, the film strips away the distance that often comes with decades of retelling. It leaves viewers face-to-face with the executions, the pits, and the everyday routines of the perpetrators who documented their own brutality as if it were mundane. This is not a retelling designed to create emotional peaks; it is a record that doesn’t need embellishment to make its point. The result is stark, direct, and deeply difficult, but necessary.

THE FAMILY PLAN 2 offers viewers a clear sense of what it is and exactly who it’s made for. From the opening scenes, it’s obvious that this sequel isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel or evolve beyond its established tone. Instead, it leans into a blend of holiday spirit, international adventure, and family-driven chaos. It gives its returning cast room to stretch into a bigger-scale playground without losing the grounded dynamic that made the first film likable enough to warrant a sequel.

There’s something refreshingly direct about HUMANS IN THE LOOP. It doesn’t wrap its ideas in spectacle, and it doesn’t try to overwhelm you with the scale of its commentary. Instead, it begins with a grounded, lived-in world and slowly reveals how the smallest, quietest decisions can shape the forces that will one day affect millions. The story’s power stems from its personal nature, even as it tackles a topic that is often reduced to headlines, buzzwords, and apocalyptic think pieces. Here, the human cost of artificial intelligence isn’t theoretical — it’s a daily routine, a mother’s job, and a community’s key to survival.

MIRROR LIFE opens with a grounded approach rather than a dramatic one, building its story around a woman who refuses to let her cousin’s disappearance be dismissed as another tragedy in a chaotic world. Instead of relying on a grand hook or flashy gimmick, the film uses a steady, methodical setup to pull Tracy into an unnerving investigation. The premise itself has weight: a missing family member, a secretive clinical trial, and a new miracle drug marketed as a scientific breakthrough. It’s a foundation that doesn’t need embellishment because it taps into fears that are already very real.

In LITTLE TROUBLE GIRLS, debut filmmaker Urška Djukić transforms a seemingly simple story of adolescence into something layered, lyrical, and quietly confrontational. Set within the walls of a Catholic school and its devout choir, the film doesn’t settle for a tale of rebellion; instead, it examines what happens when self-discovery collides with faith — when the body becomes its own kind of confessional. It’s both intimate and unnerving, told through delicate gestures and unspoken questions that linger long after the credits fade.

There’s a raw honesty that clings to BOSTON KICKOUT, Paul Hills’ semi-autobiographical debut, newly restored in 4K for its 30th anniversary, captures the malaise of working-class Britain in the early 1990s. In this place, youth gives way to frustration, where concrete estates breed both boredom and defiance. It’s a film that never shouts its message yet leaves you with the dull ache of recognition: the sense that some generations were promised everything and given almost nothing.

When RED PLANET arrived in 2000, the world was still dreaming about reaching Mars. Instead of hope, what audiences got was a film that turned that dream into a desperate, oxygen-starved survival story. It came out the same year as Brian De Palma’s MISSION TO MARS, giving us one of the oddest box office rivalries of its era: two big-budget, serious-faced Mars movies released months apart, each trying to prove who could make humanity’s last hope look more believable. Antony Hoffman’s film didn’t win that race, but it didn’t completely crash either—it simply stranded itself somewhere between philosophical drama and popcorn survival thriller.

REAWAKENING opens not with a mystery, but with an ache. It’s a story about parents who have spent a decade trapped between denial and despair, living in a routine that barely hides the damage beneath. When their missing daughter suddenly returns as an adult, the film doesn’t give us all the answers—it lingers in the haunting question of what happens when grief is forced to change shape.

Timo Vuorensola has always been a director drawn to extremes. Whether sending Nazis to the Moon in IRON SKY or reimagining horror as an absolute and unintentional trainwreck through JEEPERS CREEPERS: REBORN. ALTERED continues that pattern — a stylish, high-concept dystopian thriller that wants to question humanity’s obsession with improvement but occasionally drowns in its own ambition. It’s an impressive spectacle for what it aims to be, yet one that constantly struggles against uneven storytelling and thematic overload.

THE NAUGHTY LIST OF MR. SCROOGE begins with something that works immediately: a group of former college friends gathering for a holiday reunion in a remote chalet, only to find themselves stalked by someone dressed as an (very) unnerving version of Ebenezer Scrooge. It’s a straightforward setup, but the film leans into its seasonal hook with enough confidence to stand apart from the usual Christmas horror offerings. The snowy, isolated setting lends the story a natural sense of unease before the violence even begins, and the film wastes no time turning those early hints of tension into something.

LAUREL & HARDY: THE DEFINITIVE RESTORATIONS VOLUME 2 arrives as both an act of preservation and celebration. What Kit Parker Films and MVD Entertainment have assembled here is more than a nostalgia trip—it’s a technical and collector triumph that reintroduces one of cinema’s most influential duos to audiences who may have only known their work through faded prints or clips on YouTube. This Blu-ray set restores not just image and sound, but also a sense of comedy and timing that modern audiences may have forgotten how to appreciate.

What happens when art literally moves into the heart of consumerism? SECRET MALL APARTMENT answers that question with humor, heart, and rebellion. Director Jeremy Workman transforms an already-legendary story into an unexpectedly soulful documentary — one that finds as much beauty in drywall and duct tape as it does in the artists who dared to imagine a home within the walls of Providence Place Mall. The result is part social experiment, part philosophical study, and part love letter to the kind of creativity that refuses to play by the rules.

TATSUMI opens in a corner of the underworld most films only mention in whispers: the person who shows up after the violence to clear the scene. That detail immediately tells you what kind of story this is—less about the swaggering side of organized crime and more about the residue it leaves on people who never get a headline. Tatsumi is a fisherman by day and a cleaner for local yakuza by night, a man whose life is defined by proximity to the worst moments of other people’s choices. When his ex-girlfriend is murdered and her teenage sister Aoi charges headlong toward payback, he steps in—partly out of guilt, partly out of duty, and partly because he recognizes a path that can only end one way.

SERIOUS PEOPLE starts with a straightforward, sharp what-if: right as a music-video director is about to become a father, the biggest job of his career lands in his inbox. He wants to be there for the birth and maintain his momentum. The solution he lands on is very Los Angeles—don’t miss the gig; just find someone to play you. From that premise, the film builds a funny, awkward, and occasionally bracing exploration of authorship, ego, and the economy of attention that treats human beings like interchangeable brand assets.

From the moment the opening frames of this story, the sense is clear: this is not simply a holiday feature-ette about a classic Christmas song, but a layered portrait of life. MORE THAN SANTA BABY positions its subject, composer Philip Springer, not only as the writer of the immortal “Santa Baby,” but as a figure whose career spans decades, transitions, reinventions, and a burning creative fire. The project is directed by his daughter, Tamar Springer, and from that personal standpoint, the film carries an intimacy many music documentaries miss.

Ali and Katie begin their relationship with the kind of strength that feels unstoppable — two people building a shared life in New York, thinking only of the promise ahead of them. But reality is never polite enough to wait for love to settle in. This film captures that moment when external forces make a private relationship suddenly feel like an open case file. It is grounded in the emotion that comes with starting over, particularly when one partner’s right to remain is always negotiable.

Nazisploitation has always traded on provocation. The marketing, the titles, the posters — all designed to generate moral panic and curiosity. SS EXPERIMENT LOVE CAMP belongs to that lineage, and its reputation precedes it by nearly fifty years. What’s surprising, revisiting it now, is how little the film has beyond the provocation. For a movie engineered to shock, it’s curiously monotonous, a cycle of cruelty-as-spectacle that rarely builds tension, depth, or even consistent pulp momentum. The result lands squarely in the middle for me: not good, not unwatchable, where notoriety does more heavy lifting than the filmmaking.

The most striking thing about COME SEE ME IN THE GOOD LIGHT is how unafraid it is to embrace joy. That statement might seem simple, almost naïve, considering the film centers on the living reality of an incurable cancer diagnosis. Yet there’s nothing naïve happening here — this is a documentary that insists life is meant to be lived, even when the clock is no longer subtle about its presence. Director Ryan White captures this belief through the relationship between poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley, who face the brutality of illness with a partnership that balances a delicate rope between humor and heartbreak. The result is a film that feels remarkably alive, present, and emotionally precise.

WTO/99 is a reminder of a moment when the ground beneath a nation shifted, and tens of thousands of everyday people believed they could push back hard enough to make the world listen. It tells the story of the 1999 Seattle protests not by explaining what happened but by immersing you directly into the chaos, emotion, and urgency of those four days. Through nothing but archival footage and a meticulously assembled structure, the documentary pulls viewers into a fight that many dismissed at the time as fringe anger — but now feels unsettlingly prophetic.

STEVE SCHAPIRO: BEING EVERYWHERE focuses on the power of the person behind the lens. Instead of stacking talking heads or rushing through decades of iconic imagery, the documentary does something more intimate: it sits with Steve Schapiro. It lets him tell the stories that shaped his perspective. As he recalls the moments that defined a career spent moving between Hollywood and the heart of American social movements, the film reminds you that history doesn’t just happen in front of a camera — sometimes it’s preserved because someone showed up with one.

ONE TO ONE: JOHN & YOKO approaches the well-documented couple with a fresh, tightly focused experience: eighteen months in New York City that culminate in a single concert with a very specific purpose. Rather than assembling a gallery of outside commentators to tell the story, the film puts the period itself in the foreground—television, news breaks, game shows, political broadcasts—then lets John Lennon and Yoko Ono move through that commotion as artists trying to make their actions matter. It’s an elegant structural choice. The result isn’t a scrapbook of greatest hits, but a portrait of process: how two people shaped their lives around a cause and recalibrated their approach as the stakes changed.

UNLICENSED is the kind of film that understands the real battle always happens long before anyone steps foot into a boxing ring. Danny Goode was once a man who defined himself by winning—career, financial, and the thrill of a life lived fast. But after a stint in prison for insider trading, he emerges into a world that has moved on without him. The shame doesn’t just linger; it settles into every relationship he once took for granted. In just the first few minutes, it’s clear the film isn’t interested in glamorizing the comeback. It wants you to feel the weight of a man who’s starting from below zero.