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There’s a reason ILSA, SHE WOLF OF THE SS continues to haunt conversations about exploitation and censorship nearly fifty years after its release. It’s not a film that hides behind metaphor or restraint—it’s raw, offensive, and proudly coarse. What makes Kino Lorber’s new 4K UHD restoration noteworthy isn’t that it redeems the film, but that it confronts it. This is one of the most notorious examples of 70s grindhouse excess—filmmaking that dared viewers to recoil and look closer.

FLYING DUO is a delicate, personal, and unmistakably authentic short film that captures the ache of displacement through humor, heart, and subtle artistry. Written by Emma Brunet-Campain and directed by Robyn Faye, this ten-minute exploration of loneliness and friendship becomes a celebration of persistence—both within its story and behind the scenes. It’s the kind of short that makes viewers remember the first time they felt swallowed by a city and found comfort in someone who understood.

Idris Elba’s DUST TO DREAMS is a compact, performance-driven short about inheritance—of places, pain, and the courage it takes to keep a legacy alive. Set in Lagos, the film centers on a shy young woman suddenly responsible for her mother’s struggling nightclub, only to be confronted by a father she barely knows. It’s a simple premise, yet the emotions underneath are anything but: grief, resentment, and a stubborn hope that refuses to leave the stage even as the lights flicker.

Trevor Morris makes a striking directorial debut with BUTTERFLY ON A WHEEL, a short film that feels deeply personal yet universally resonant. Morris approaches filmmaking with the same precision he brings to music — layering emotion, rhythm, and structure into something that hums with authenticity.

HANS ZIMMER & FRIENDS: DIAMOND IN THE DESERT plays like a summation of a remarkable career and a statement piece of an icon. Across two and a half hours, the film assembles a setlist of music that marks modern blockbuster memory—DUNE, GLADIATOR, INTERSTELLAR, THE LION KING—then reframes them as living, breathing pieces written for a stage that expects the music to carry everything on its own. This isn’t “clips with an orchestra.” It’s a concert movie that treats the score as the story, letting a hand-picked band and an arena-sized production translate what audiences usually feel under dialogue and picture into a direct, physical experience.

Sequels to revolutionary comedies almost always face impossible expectations, and AIRPLANE II: THE SEQUEL is no exception. Released in 1982, just two years after the smash hit AIRPLANE!, this follow-up attempted to recapture the lightning in a bottle by sending the disaster parody into outer space. The setup is simple but ripe for gags: the first commercial lunar shuttle malfunctions, its computer system goes haywire, and Ted Striker (Robert Hays) once again must save the day, all while reconciling with Elaine (Julie Hagerty). With a cast stacked with recognizable names like Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, William Shatner, Rip Torn, and Sonny Bono, the film had every opportunity to ride high on the original’s momentum.

THE LITTLES is a short film that proves you don’t need sprawling mythology or elaborate dialogue to leave an impression. (Although I have nothing to confirm this with, I couldn’t stop thinking that this was a horror homage to the 80s animated series THE LITTLES) At only seven minutes long, it takes a deceptively simple event—a child stubbing her toe on a loose floorboard—and transforms it into a portal to a stranger, more unsettling world. With just one spoken line of dialogue, the film demands that atmosphere, visuals, and sound shoulder the full weight of the story. That gamble pays off.

EDGAR ALLAN POE’S THE OVAL PORTRAIT has the right ingredients on paper: a cursed painting, three strangers bound by a past they don’t understand, and the perfect setting—a peculiar antique shop—that practically begs for haunts, whispers, and the feeling that every object carries a memory. What it lacks is the connective tissue that makes a Gothic thriller feel alive. The mood is present, the premise is clear, and a handful of shots achieve the eerie stillness the story calls for. But the execution, especially across the ensemble, pulls attention away from the tension the film is trying to build.

Some films capture the pulse of New York; others catch its indescribable core. THE FRENCH ITALIAN exists somewhere in between—an offbeat comedy of errors about artistic delusion, noisy neighbors, and the complicated way self-importance masquerades as creativity. It’s as funny as it is uncomfortable, not because of how it’s written, but because it's not afraid to shine a light on the satirical elements within the production.

Some horror emerges from the shadows, while others are born in plain sight—shimmering under fluorescent lights, smiling through self-help slogans, and whispering promises of self-improvement. THINESTRA lives in that unsettling space between vanity and survival, turning a mirror toward modern body culture and daring the audience to look closer, even when it hurts to do so.

WHERE DID THE ADULTS GO? arrives as a narrative feature from Academy Award nominee Courtney Marsh, a filmmaker already known for blending intimate storytelling with social conscience. The film presents a seemingly simple scenario: three siblings, a family house, and the anniversary of their parents’ death. But it’s through this structure that Marsh builds something richer—a study of grief, inheritance, and identity, anchored by performances that balance vulnerability with tension.

The hook is simple enough to pitch in a sentence: a high-school kid gets dumped, finds out she’s pregnant, and decides keeping the baby might win him back and give her life direction. The film takes that impulse seriously without mocking it, then dismantles the fantasy with clear eyes and a sense of humor that never condescends. IF THAT MOCKINGBIRD DON’T SING is a teen pregnancy dramedy that respects its characters’ naïveté while insisting on accountability; it allows Sydnie’s (Aitana Doyle) hope to be sincere and simultaneously shows why “fixing” your life by having a baby is a fragile plan at best.

Every so often, a filmmaker comes along who embraces the absurdity of a genre without apology. Steven Kostanski has made a career out of that blend. With DEATHSTALKER, he doubles down on his affection for monsters, gory practical effects, and the earnest joy of throwback fantasy. This reimagining of Roger Corman’s sword-and-sorcery staple arrives with all the foam-crafted cave walls, smoke-drenched battlefields, and stop-motion monstrosities you’d expect, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. The result is a noisy return to pulp fantasy, one that knows its audience and rewards them with exactly the kind of spectacle they crave.

There’s a difference between describing the past and confronting it. AMONG NEIGHBORS traces one town’s suppressed history with a patient, unflinching gaze. Yoav Potash constructs the film from voices that are vanishing and artifacts that have been literally unearthed, shaping a moral inquiry that never loses sight of individual lives. The story is simple: elders from the Polish town of Gniewoszów share memories of Jewish neighbors whose presence has been erased from the streets, cemeteries, and official narratives. Yet, as the conversations deepen, so does the film’s focus, circling the murders that occurred after the war ended and the ramifications of telling the truth in the present day.

WHEN FALL IS COMING makes it clear that home life can be a costume. François Ozon sets the table with warmth and ritual—country air, routine, a grandmother fussing over lunch—then lets a single, pointed decision unshackle everything we know. The incident isn’t loud; it doesn’t have to be. In this house, gestures carry more weight than speeches. That’s the film’s core: a story of love and control disguised as everyday caretaking, with a grandmother who tells herself she’s fixing what years of hurt have broken.

THERE WAS, THERE WAS NOT stands as both an act of storytelling and an act of preservation. Emily Mkrtichian’s debut feature documentary explores a homeland under siege and the women who endure within it, weaving myth and reality together until the line between the two becomes impossible to separate. By centering four Armenian women living in Artsakh, the film transforms geopolitical headlines into lived truths. A chronicle of resilience, weaving the fabric of a community through the daily acts of survival, work, and resistance.

The heartbeat of this story is small, human, and resilient. FAIRYLAND traces a father-daughter bond through years when San Francisco felt like a home for reinvention—first euphoric, then devastating. It refuses melodrama and loud marks, favoring the fragile honesty of two people figuring each other out in real time. It isn’t trying to be a grand statement so much as a lived-in memory: the awkwardness of new routines, the quiet stubbornness of love, the mistakes we defend until we can’t anymore.

Dave Chappelle’s KILLIN’ THEM SOFTLY is the rare kind of comedy special that manages to feel both of its time and timeless. Shot in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Theatre back in 2000, this HBO debut didn’t just capture a rising star — it proclaimed a cultural force. Twenty-five years later, Warner Bros. Discovery is marking its legacy with a new DVD release, offering fans an opportunity to revisit the hour that catapulted Chappelle from a cult comic to a household name.

For a generation that grew up with Vee in animated form, VAMPIRINA: TEENAGE VAMPIRE isn’t just a new series—it’s a graduation, a chance to see a beloved character wrestle with bigger stages, bigger secrets, and the universal growing pains of finding yourself. VAMPIRINA: TEENAGE VAMPIRE takes the beloved character, swaps animation for live action, and keeps the beating heart (or not beating in Vee’s case)—music, friendship, and the struggle of fitting in—front and center. A tween vampire leaves Transylvania for a performing-arts boarding school in the human world, where she has to juggle secret identity anxieties, artistic ambition, a loving (and protective) family, and an overzealous ghost chaperone who complicates even the simplest moments. The fact that this is the character’s first live-action portrayal gives it a built-in curiosity factor, and the two episodes I screened suggest a series designed to balance hijinks with a serialized emotional arc.

SPAWN lives in the peculiar sweet spot where a bold comic-book world collided with late-’90s studio filmmaking. You can feel the era in every choice: aggressive CG, a hard-edged soundtrack, and a go-for-broke villain performance that threatens to hijack the movie. Yet beneath the glaze and scorched-earth aesthetic, there’s a sharp hook—a tragic antihero whose pain is as compelling as his power. That core keeps the film from toppling under its own extravagance and makes a modern revisit surprisingly enjoyable, even while the seams show.

COUNTED OUT makes a simple, potent claim: in a world arranged by code, statistics, and algorithms, math is a language of power—and literacy in that language affects who gets hired, who gets heard, and who gets a real say. Vicki Abeles builds that claim into a focused documentary that treats mathematics not as a test to pass but as a civic tool. The result is engaging, unusually clear, and sincere about the shame and anxiety that many people still carry from their school days.

AKASHI is a story that wears its duality on its sleeve—bridging continents, generations, and emotional timelines. Director Mayumi Yoshida transforms her award-winning short into a deeply personal feature, one that explores grief, romance, and the weight of secrets handed down through family. From the outset, this isn’t framed as just a homecoming drama but as a reckoning with identity. Kana (played by Yoshida herself), a struggling artist who’s been living in Vancouver, returns to Tokyo for her grandmother’s funeral. In that journey back, the film opens layers of memory and buried truths that ripple through the lives of those left behind.

THE ART OF ADVENTURE tracks an irresistible premise with a simple confidence: two curious young Canadians—painter Robert Bateman and biologist Bristol Foster—set off in 1957 in a suped up Land Rover nicknamed “Grizzly Torque,” roaming across Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia with a sketchbook, a 16mm camera, and more nerve than budget. Director Alison Reid doesn’t just recount where they went; she shows how a road trip crystallized into a lifelong mission, translating awe into action. The result is a buoyant, clear-eyed documentary that feels like a road movie first and a career retrospective second. That order matters—the film offers a lived experience, then threads it to legacy.

UNDELETABLE is the rare short that understands how comedy and pain are often the same sound at different volumes. It traps a grieving daughter and lets every misstep, every backspace that isn’t possible, every awkward correction, reveal a life cracking in real time. In seven minutes, the film pulls off an emotional high-wire act: it’s funny because you recognize the panic of leaving a message you can’t edit. It’s devastating because the stakes are as high as they could be. That double exposure—humor laid directly over heartbreak—is the film’s engine.