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ADVENTURE TIME grew into something much weirder, sadder, and more emotionally complicated than its early episodes suggested, which makes ADVENTURE TIME: SIDE QUESTS an interesting kind of revival. It doesn’t try to outdo the original. It doesn’t chase the heavier mythology of later seasons or the more mature ache of FIONNA AND CAKE. Instead, it looks backward toward the goofy, monster-punching days when Finn and Jake could wander into trouble for reasons that barely mattered, then leave behind a joke, a weird little creature, and a feeling that Ooo had more depth than anyone knew.

The scariest thing about JANE’S NOT HERE isn’t the possibility that Jane Hayes is losing her mind. It’s the possibility that everyone else is wrong. Jonathan Oster’s psychological drama begins with a premise that sounds like a puzzle-box thriller, then keeps pulling the story back toward something more painful. Jane wakes from a three-month coma after a catastrophic accident with vivid memories of a husband and son. Doctors tell her those memories were created by her unconscious mind. Her brother Brady tries to help her rebuild a life that she barely recognizes. The world says one thing. Jane’s heart says another. That divide gives the film its mystery, although the deeper concern isn’t simply whether the family she remembers existed. The harder question is what happens to a person when love has nowhere to go.

Nobody moves to Los Angeles to become a cautionary tale of failure, which is why the joke throughout DAVE VS. HOLLYWOOD works before Dave even knows he’s the punchline. He arrives there with the same doomed optimism that has fueled a century of Hollywood hopefuls, only he doesn’t have the contacts, leverage, timing, family connections, money, industry friends, or freak accident of luck that usually separates the “struggling actor” story from the “guy explaining his plan at a party no one invited him to” story.

Hotel rooms can feel enormous to a kid, even when they barely have space for a bed, a chair, and a strip of carpet wide enough to become anything. There’s something otherworldly about the spaces. CAPTAIN MILO understands that contradiction from the start. Darcy Miller’s short drama doesn’t treat imagination as an accessory or a sentimental shortcut. It treats it as labor. Milo isn’t only playing because it’s fun. He’s playing because nobody else is there to help him organize the day, soften the silence, or keep the loneliness from getting too close.

LUCKY STRIKE builds tension around a battlefield that feels almost quaint by modern standards, then treats that like a lifeline, a weapon, and a prayer all at once. A wounded American soldier is trapped behind German lines during the Battle of the Bulge, separated from his unit, surrounded by enemy movement, and dependent on a Motorola SCR-300 radio to survive long enough to make it home. That kind of premise can turn into the idea that survival comes down to cold air, bad odds, and the thin hope that someone on the other end of the signal is still listening.

Some careers ask people to be rejected over and over again and then call it persistence. HEKLA understands that humiliation, hope, and performance aren’t separate parts of an actor’s life so much as overlapping fronts, each one rolling in before the last has moved on. Michael Glover Smith’s film follows Hekla Gudmunsdottir across one hectic Chicago day, sending her through auditions, headshots, relationship fallout, old insecurities, new humiliations, and an evening performance of LADY MACBETH in a dive bar. The result is a funny, bruised, and deeply lived-in portrait of an artist trying to believe in herself while the world keeps offering maybe, later, no, and we’ll be in touch.

FOR THE LOVE OF A WOMAN understands that family history rarely comes with a perfect explanation. It comes through fragments, omissions, letters left too late, and people who spent decades surviving choices they never learned how to name. Guido Chiesa’s adaptation of Meir Shalev’s THE LOVES OF JUDITH reaches for that uneasy space between mystery and inheritance, following Esther Horwitz, an American woman in the 1970s whose mother’s death sends her toward Israel and toward a buried story from British Mandate Palestine. The movie has the shape of a romantic historical saga, but its better instincts are quieter than that. A daughter trying to understand why love, shame, and silence have been passed down to her like family property.

JULIÁN explores childhood as a place where the real and imagined worlds are never far apart. An apartment can become a treasure hunt, a Brooklyn block can open toward fascination, and a child’s dream can grow large enough to reshape an entire summer. Adapted from Jessica Love’s beloved picture book JULIÁN IS A MERMAID, Louise Bagnall’s animated feature takes a story known for its tenderness and expands it without losing the emotion that made the original resonate. It’s a film about gender expression, family, Caribbean heritage, and self-discovery, but it never reduces Julián to anything less. He’s allowed to be a child first. He’s curious, watchful, imaginative, nervous, enchanted, and ready to become something he doesn’t yet have a way to explain.

There’s a meaningful, painful story buried inside THE GOAT, and the frustrating thing is how often the film seems to know it. Ilaria Borrelli’s English/Arabic language drama has urgency, anger, and a young lead performance strong enough to hold attention, even when the movie around it keeps buffing complex issues down to blunt dramatic points.

The woods in CAMP don’t feel like an escape from the world. They feel like a place where every bad thought is more like an echo. Avalon Fast’s latest feature takes the familiar idea of a summer camp horror movie and pulls it apart until something different, sadder, and more personal remains. Cabins, campfires, counselors, rituals, secrets in the trees, those ingredients are all there, but CAMP isn’t built around the usual slasher expectations. It’s more interested in how grief mutates when someone is too young to understand it, too guilty to process it, and too desperate for absolution to recognize the danger in being welcomed too quickly.

Wim Verstappen’s 1972 Dutch satire arrives in its restored Cult Epics edition with provocation, made in the aftermath of BLUE MOVIE and carrying many of the same era’s obsessions with sex, commerce, liberation, and rot. The result isn’t an easy rediscovery. It’s blunt, unpleasant, dry, funny, occasionally brilliant, and often so committed to making its audience squirm that entertainment becomes almost incidental to the attack.

Some physical media releases are about preserving great cinema. Others are about preserving a moment when it took chances, got weird, heavily synthesized, acted questionably, and somehow became immortal. MORTAL KOMBAT KOLLECTION belongs proudly to the second group. This Arrow Video release doesn’t make a case that both original live-action MORTAL KOMBAT films are secretly pure cinema waiting for critical reappraisal. It does something more useful. It treats them as objects of fan memory, genre history, studio ambition, arcade-era mythology, and pure 90s excess. On that level, this set is an absolute beast.

A beautiful image can only protect a character for so long. SKIN OF YOUTH is filled with images that glimmer, ache, seduce, and sting, but the longer Ash Mayfair’s second feature goes on, the more its beauty starts to feel like it's trapped inside a story that keeps choosing pain as its language. This is a visually commanding, emotionally sincere film with clear personal conviction behind it. It also becomes frustrating in the way it repeatedly pushes its transgender lead through brutality, humiliation, and sacrifice until the character’s humanity sometimes has to fight against the movie’s own appetite for suffering.

War films often return to the same ideas because those images are so impactful and clear. Soldiers, weapons, destroyed buildings, emptied streets, families running, bodies waiting to be counted. ANIMALS IN WAR doesn’t ignore any of that devastation, but it changes the point of entry. The film looks at Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine through animals caught inside the human-made catastrophe, and that is more than a framing device. It strips war of its arguments, slogans, strategies, and excuses until all that remains is harm spreading outward from people who started it to every living thing forced to endure it.

CABALI AND THE TIKI MUG OBSESSION is built around recognition, that strange little feeling when someone explains a passion so specifically, so intensely, and with such open-hearted conviction that even outsiders to the subculture start to understand the importance. Tiki mugs may sound like novelty objects, the kind of thing someone buys on vacation, forgets in a cabinet, or spots on a dusty thrift store shelf. Josh Dragotta’s film treats them differently, with a respect that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. It sees them as sculpture, memory, history, community, and mythology, sometimes all at once.