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KUMAIL NANJIANI: NIGHT THOUGHTS feels less like a victory lap and more like a check-in. After nearly a decade away from the stand-up stage, Nanjiani returns not with a reinvention or a carefully manufactured “comeback” but with something more reflective. The decision to return to Chicago, where his stand-up career first began, gives the special an understated emotional grounding that informs everything that follows. There’s something heartwarming about the full circle and the appreciation that Nanjiani shows for the reality he lives in.

INSIDE, THE VALLEY SINGS is one of those films that quietly settles into your head and refuses to leave. At just fifteen minutes, it doesn’t waste time trying to shock or provoke through sensation or description. Instead, it builds something far more unsettling: an intimate, sustained portrait of what prolonged solitary confinement does to the human mind, and how imagination becomes both refuge and lifeline when all physical connection has been stripped away.

FREYR offers a twist with something that would be absurd in another film: a hand growing from a man’s chest. The image is impossible to process without curiosity. What would a life look like with a body so visibly different that strangers never learn to see anything else? Instead of treating the condition as a metaphor, the film places it within a funeral, where a coworker tries to make sense of the friendship that formed around that difference. By starting after Freyr is gone, the film collapses time. Everything we learn about him arrives through memory, grief, and the gratitude that comes from being truly seen by one person in a world that never learned how to look.

SCHRÖDINGER’S TOY isn’t just an exploration of quantum theory with two stunning product reviewers—it’s ten minutes of pure sapphic fun that wraps science, curiosity, and pleasure into a tight and unapologetically strange short. Evie Rees arrives home to find Cherry Tart, and she brings a mysterious new toy to test. What follows is less about figuring out how it works and more about finding out what it makes them feel, while trying to understand the why.

THE BOY WITH WHITE SKIN delivers into a sense of purpose that is immediate and unforced, grounding its story in the kind of reality that is rarely shown with this level of clarity. What unfolds is a portrait of a child whose presence is treated as both a gift and a burden, someone caught within a belief system older than he is, shaped by adults who view him as more of a symbol than an individual. Writer/director Simon Panay’s work is built on over a decade of on-the-ground immersion, and the depth of that commitment is evident from the details woven throughout the film. Even without stating it outright, you feel the years of observation behind every gesture, every glance, every unspoken rule that governs the mining community.

Something is compelling about watching two men cross each other with equal parts suspicion and longing for connection, and MY NEIGHBOR ADOLF leans into that with surprising tenderness. What begins as a clash between strangers slowly reveals itself as a story about the emotional weight people carry long after the world believes they should have healed. This film thrives not because of its mystery, but because of how it reframes paranoia, grief, and the possibility of companionship in the unlikeliest landscape.

MUSHROOM DAD offers up a unique experience as a short film that suggests a feature-length understanding of character, tone, and emotional timing. Michael Yuchen Lei’s story unfolds over the course of a single life-changing evening, set against the chaos of a restaurant opening, with something far more focused at its center. Julian, a young chef hoping to define himself through his craft, is confronted by the father he keeps at arm’s length. Their strained relationship is immediately evident in how they occupy the same space—Julian’s control clashing with his father’s dissolution, each trying to mask the emotional toll beneath their interactions. The film wastes no time establishing a sense of frayed connection. When the accident sends everything spiraling, it becomes clear that the chaos simply forces into the open what both men have been burying.

Some pandemic stories flood the screen with chaos because it makes the fear easier to process. NO MORE TIME goes in the opposite direction — it drains the world until there’s barely anything left. The setting of empty cabins in the mountains, half-finished sentences on the radio, and two people trying to hold onto themselves even as the world outside forces everyone into a state of survival that looks more feral than human. It’s a pandemic movie, but it isn’t recreating headlines. It’s more interested in the slow deterioration of trust when catastrophe becomes normal.

There’s a rule that most horror films embrace without question: fear is loud. Doors slam, footsteps echo, voices distort, and the score claws its way into the viewer like a physical force. HAUNTERS OF THE SILENCE rejects that approach. Its opening passages establish a different kind of dread — one built on stillness, interrupted breaths, and the quiet weight of unresolved memory. Rather than giving in to fear, it studies it, letting isolation become as threatening as any creature or loud jump scare. I want to start with clarity: this film wasn’t for me, but some will absolutely love it.

BITTER DESIRE offers up the kind of premise that could easily fuel a tight, grounded thriller: a wounded police officer, a nurse who isn’t who she claims to be, and a home that becomes a battleground for misplaced trust. Conceptually, it’s a setup built for tension. The problem is that the final film never finds a way to make that tension feel convincing. What emerges instead is a well-intentioned project that struggles to rise above its limitations, even though you can see the filmmakers cared deeply about getting it made.

This scene leans heavily on risk and proximity rather than emotion, framing the action around secrecy, impulse, and the thrill of getting away with it. The setup is simple but effective: two step siblings pushing past hesitation in a place where discretion actually matters, with someone else present but unaware.

A world-ending disaster usually brings along chaos, cities crashing into rubble, and a camera shouting over the noise. WE BURY THE DEAD works in the opposite direction. The catastrophe has already happened. It’s quiet now. Ash settles, bodies lie where they fell, and the survivors are left to clean up the pieces without answers or time to process. The film is built around a simple idea: when the dead refuse to stay buried, grief doesn’t disappear; it intensifies. Zak Hilditch approaches the premise with restraint, focusing less on gore and more on the fallout of a world that suddenly made no sense.

This documentary approaches Julian Assange like the eye of a storm, not a martyr standing on a hill. THE SIX BILLION DOLLAR MAN treats him as a symbol caught between governments, surveillance systems, fractured narratives, and the terrifying frame of a world where information itself is weaponized. Eugene Jarecki’s award-winning return to the political documentary form is the kind of film that’s less interested in what Assange did, moment to moment, than in what his existence reveals about how power operates today. It’s confident, concentrated, and structured with the tension of a political thriller, even as it tackles territory that’s been explored before. What’s new is the scale and the access.

DELINQUENT SCHOOLGIRLS is the kind of film that doesn’t ask whether its premise is appropriate, logical, or even remotely defensible. It simply launches into chaos with commitment, reflecting a period of exploitation filmmaking built on shock value, budgets, and whatever concept could draw attention on a marquee. Watching it today is less about the story—which barely exists—and more about experiencing a very specific corner of 1970s grindhouse cinema, one where boundaries were pushed mostly because no one involved believed any existed. This new addition to the PSYCHO TRONICA line embraces exactly that, packaging a notorious title with a much-needed restoration that leaves every rough edge intact.

TIMESTAMP is constructed without narration, interviews, or commentary, yet there is not a moment when the film feels silent. On the surface, it documents school life in Ukraine during the ongoing Russian invasion. That premise alone would suggest something direct and investigative, a chronicle of crisis through the eyes of children and teachers. Instead, the film achieves something more: it captures the persistence of the ordinary while the extraordinary becomes constant. Every scene appears calm, but danger is never more than a siren away. The documentary’s design makes normalcy feel like an act of resistance.