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There are movies you just watch, and then there are movies you simply surrender to. THE CAT is the latter. Lam Nai-Choi’s cult oddity barrels forward with a confidence that dares you to keep up: a goo-monster antagonist, body-possession, a tag-team of good-guy extraterrestrials… and, yes, a black cat who throws down like a stunt professional. It reads like a dare on paper and plays like a dare on screen, marrying Hong Kong action with creature-feature messiness and the elastic logic of pulp sci-fi. If that sounds like a lot, it is—and that excess is exactly the point.

There’s a quality to DEAD OF WINTER that suits its title perfectly. Set in the frozen wilds of northern Minnesota, this thriller doesn’t waste time dressing its story in excess. Instead, it strips everything down to bare survival, the cold gnawing at both body and spirit, and places Emma Thompson at its center as a widow forced into a harrowing fight for another woman’s life. At once tense, emotional, and somewhat traditional, Brian Kirk’s film succeeds largely because of its lead’s presence and the unforgiving landscape she’s trapped within.

The fourth entry swaps survival chaos for white-knuckle emotion. THE CONCORDE… AIRPORT ’79 isn’t shy about what it wants to be: a glossy, globe-trotting thriller that straps you into an icon of aviation and keeps yanking the yoke. The plot is simple and loud. A jet-setting TV reporter carries information that could expose a powerful ex-lover; he responds with sabotage, missiles, and one wildly public attempt after another to ensure the story never sees the light of day. It’s pulp in a tailored suit—lean on nuance, heavy on spectacle.

DERELICT is the kind of film that thrives on discomfort. Jonathan Zaurin’s sophomore feature plunges into a world of grief, fractured memory, and retribution. Still, it does so with a level of artistry that makes it feel both punishing and magnetic. It opens with a crime that already happened, a life snuffed out, and the ripples of that moment spread outward across two families, each unraveling in different but equally devastating ways. This isn’t just another revenge drama—it’s a slow dissection of what violence leaves behind and how the pursuit of closure often leads to more destruction than healing.

At first glance, THE ODD JOB feels like an easy sell. Graham Chapman, just off the height of Monty Python’s success and on the cusp of LIFE OF BRIAN, co-writes and stars in a dark comedy about a man so desperate that he hires someone to kill him. Directed by Peter Medak and featuring David Jason, Diana Quick, Richard O’Brien, and Carolyn Seymour, the film assembles a lineup of British talent that should, by all accounts, have guaranteed success. Yet the result is something stranger: a black comedy that teeters between brilliance and commonness, remembered today as much for its production oddities as for its jokes.

AIRPORT arrives with the kind of Hollywood bravado only 1970 could muster: a sprawling ensemble, a bestselling novel as source material, and the promise of spectacle wrapped in a glossy studio production. George Seaton’s adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s hit book doesn’t just chart one perilous night at Lincoln International—it all but invents a genre, laying down the tarmac for a decade of big-budget disaster films to follow. Watching it now, especially in Kino Lorber’s new 4K restoration, is to witness the moment when melodrama, spectacle, and procedural collided at cruising altitude.

The film opens in winter and lingers there—not for elegance, but for the way snow transforms a place and how people move through it. That choice tells you a lot about how MY SUNSHINE operates. Hiroshi Okuyama favors small gestures and unforced moments, letting the season become a quiet metronome for emotional time. The story tracks a boy written off as the worst on his hockey team, the girl whose figure skating seems to promise escape, and a coach who recognizes something familiar (and faintly wounded) in both of them. What starts as mentorship gradually reshapes itself into a delicate triangle—supportive, protective, and then, inevitably, strained.

The movie begins where myth and rumor often intersect: a cramped apartment, a hungry city, and a young woman seeking a way out. QUEEN OF MANHATTAN isn’t just recreating a time and place; it’s arguing that 1970s–80s Times Square functioned like an engine—one that chewed people up, spit them out, and occasionally turned someone into a legend. In centering Vanessa Del Rio’s rise, the film threads a needle biopics often miss: it treats the adult industry as labor, not a punchline, and it respects the performer’s intelligence about her own image. The result is a pulpy, neon-drenched portrait with moments of tension, even when it leans a bit too hard on familiar rags-to-riches cliches.

BROWNSVILLE BRED anchors us firmly in the lived-in reality of memory, community, and survival. Elaine Del Valle’s debut feature feels less like a conventional movie and more like an act of reclamation — the reshaping of pain, resilience, and cultural identity into a narrative that refuses to compromise its truth. Adapted from Del Valle’s acclaimed stage play and autobiographical novel, and expanded from her SXSW Audience Award-winning short, the film emerges as a raw yet vibrant testament to the power of storytelling born from personal experience.

CHAIN REACTIONS isn’t a “making-of.” It’s a meditation on why a scrappy 1970s horror film keeps rattling around in our collective headspace, and how it continues to shape artists five decades later. Alexandre O. Philippe treats the subject with the same introspective rigor that has become his signature: isolating a foundational text, assembling an eclectic group of icons, and asking not what happened on set, but what the film did—and still does—to our senses, our anxieties, and our art. The result is a confident, idea-forward documentary that’s equal parts criticism, confession, and cinematic séance.

When the crime world collides with mentorship, the results can be both explosive and surprisingly tender. LONDON CALLING leans into that contradiction with gusto, offering an action-comedy that’s equal parts shootouts, road movie, and unlikely bonding. Directed by Allan Ungar, who previously collaborated with Josh Duhamel, the film aims to deliver entertainment that recalls the buddy movies of the 1980s and 1990s while carving out a contemporary spin.

Awkwardness has long been comedy’s secret weapon, and DOIN’ IT embraces that awkward edge with enthusiasm. Lilly Singh steps into her first leading role on the big screen, playing Maya, a thirty-year-old software engineer who never quite grew out of the shadow of her strict upbringing. What starts as an absurd setup— a virgin suddenly tasked with teaching high school sex education — gradually morphs into something deeper, a story about shame, self-acceptance, and finding one’s voice. The film doesn’t always strike the perfect balance between raunchy gags and genuine commentary, but it has enough personality and honesty to make the experience worthwhile.

DON Q opens with a man who never stopped narrating his life like a legend. Al Quinto’s days are small—errands, conversations, rituals—but in his head they add up to a coronation. He’s convinced he’s the one who can restore Little Italy to a version of itself that probably never existed, the way he imagines. That gap between the story he tells and the one the neighborhood is living is the film’s heartbeat, and it’s where both drama and humor are created.

POCKET PRINCESS on the surface is miniature: stop-motion, threadbare fabrics, papier-mâché edges, and a dollhouse scale that invites you to lean in. The undercurrent is anything but small. Olivia Loccisano utilizes the tactile limits of the medium—visible seams, deliberate roughness, and handmade textures—as an emotional buffer, allowing the film to confront material that many live-action features refuse to touch. That choice isn’t just aesthetic; it’s a thesis. The deception keeps us from flinching long enough to process what the story is actually saying.

There’s “gritty New York,” and then there’s Night of the Juggler—a movie that wears late-’70s/early-’80s NYC like a bruise. The premise is ruthlessly simple: a teen is abducted by a psycho; her father, a hard-charging ex-cop, tears across the city to find her. What lifts it above the logline is the film’s breathless velocity and its tactile sense of place. This is 24 hours as demolition derby: foot chases, cab chases, subway chases—stitched so tightly you barely have time to blink.

THE BETRAYAL begins with a single decision that sets everything else in motion. A loyal warrior is asked to shoulder a false charge of murder to shield his clan from political fallout. He accepts with the understanding that he’ll go into hiding for a year and then be welcomed back once the storm has passed. But what sounds like a temporary sacrifice quickly mutates into a permanent exile. Promises evaporate, protections vanish, and the clan that asked for loyalty quietly abandons him. From that point on, the film is less about one man’s mistake than about how an entire system uses honor as both carrot and weapon.

The best way to approach these companion pieces is to imagine two visits to the same corner—same storefront, same faces drifting in and out—but on different days of the week. One day is all about listening; the next is about letting the room talk. SMOKE is the quiet one: a neighborhood drama that sneaks up on you through ordinary conversation and the small rituals that give people meaning. BLUE IN THE FACE is the loud cousin: faster, looser, full of diversions and drop-ins that feel like a street party. Put together, they celebrate how a place can organize a life, and how a life can reorganize a place.

Sometimes film history gets shaped by accident, and FRANKENSTEIN’S BLOODY TERROR is proof of that. Though the title suggests another spin on Mary Shelley’s creation, this Spanish horror oddity has nothing to do with Frankenstein. Instead, it introduces the character that would define Paul Naschy’s career: Waldemar Daninsky, a doomed nobleman cursed to transform into a werewolf. The bait-and-switch title was a marketing decision for its U.S. release, designed to satisfy distributors who wanted something with “Frankenstein” and “Terror” in the name. The result is a film that has long confused casual viewers but has delighted cult fans, especially now that Kino Lorber has brought it back in a new 3-D restoration.

The premise is loaded: an undocumented man on the edge of removal bumps into the friend he hasn’t figured out how to forgive. From there, the film doesn’t sprint so much as strings its way through a minefield of deadlines, affidavits, and unspoken history. The stakes are public and timely—immigration court, paperwork that can erase a life with a rubber stamp—but the movie stays resolutely personal. It treats policy as weather: always present, occasionally catastrophic, but most felt in the way people adjust their plans and measure their hopes.

LOS GOLFOS doesn’t ask for nostalgia or redemption; it asks you to sit with a city that never noticed these kids until it needed to punish them. Carlos Saura’s first feature drops you in Madrid’s postwar margins, where a brotherhood of teens drifts between odd jobs, minor scores, and the kind of plans that feel big only because the wallet is empty. The script is deception, raising money so one of them can enter a bullfighting competition, the one “profession” that looks like a ladder out of poverty. The simplicity is the point. When survival is the day’s only plot, even a small goal becomes epic.

The promise here is simple and potent: two delinquents grow into power together and pay for it together. FLAMING BROTHERS doesn’t chase reinvention so much as it hunts for sincerity inside a well-worn outline—loyalty vs. ambition, brotherhood vs. survival. What makes it click, even when it stumbles, is the alchemy between a star in full bloom and a script that’s quietly sketching the bones of themes its writer would later obsess over.

Larry the Cable Guy has built a career on the unlikely marriage of down-home humor and edgy but warm comedy, and his latest stand-up special proves he hasn’t lost the knack. Filmed at Florida’s historic Capitol Theater, IT’S A GIFT finds him returning to the stage with the same everyman persona that first made him a household name. While some comedians reinvent themselves with every outing, Larry leans into consistency—his voice, both literal and comedic, remains as unmistakable as ever.

DAKOTA is a film defined by obsession—both in the story it tells and the story behind its making. At its center is Dick de Boer, played with conviction by Kees Brusse, a Dutch pilot whose life is tethered to his DC-3 Dakota. For Dick, flying isn’t just an occupation; it’s survival, compulsion, and the only place he seems to feel alive. That singular fixation gives the movie its shape, even when production chaos nearly brought it to a halt.

Few trilogies define a filmmaker’s voice as directly as Nicolas Winding Refn’s PUSHER films. Spanning a decade, these three entries chart Copenhagen’s criminal underworld from shifting perspectives: the hustler scrambling for survival, the screw-up desperate for respect, and the kingpin watching his empire crumble. Each film stands alone, but together they paint a panorama of power, desperation, and inevitability that lingers long after the credits roll.

Now and then, a film comes along that isn’t defined by its creature design, its chase sequences, or even its premise, but instead by the performance at its center. XENO is one of those films. For all its polish and high-concept pitch, what ultimately makes the movie land is Lulu Wilson. She anchors the story with a performance that radiates both heart and grit, carrying every scene with a natural presence.