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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.

SUPERCLAUS takes place in a world where Santa has grown just a bit restless. He loves his Christmas duties, sure — but all the attention goes to SuperClaus, a fictional superhero version of himself celebrated in a blockbuster franchise adored by kids and marketed into oblivion. One bump on the noggin later, Santa believes the fantasy is reality, and suddenly the North Pole has a hero with a misplaced identity and no brakes.

BULL RUN dives into the intoxicating world of high finance from a refreshingly personal angle. It follows Bobby Sanders, a former hockey player, as he tries to force himself into a career that looks great on paper but feels hollow in reality. He wants to belong to the world of big money and fast decisions, but every step forward raises the same question: what’s the point if you lose yourself in the climb?

This was a strange one, and when I say strange, I mean it both in the context of the film, but also just the experience. At its best, SALLYWOOD is a story about caretaking—of a career, of a dream, of a person you’ve decided to believe in even when others have moved on. Writer/director Xaque Gruber frames the film from the point of view of Zack (Tyler Steelman), a young writer who grew up haunted—in a good way—by Sally Kirkland’s work in ANNA. He shows up in Los Angeles with hope and little else. Through an amusing encounter that belongs to the city’s mythology, he’s suddenly carrying bags, answering calls, and trying to stage/manage a comeback for his idol. The film treats that arrangement with a mix of sincerity and bemused self-awareness; it knows this is the kind of story people roll their eyes at, then quietly root for anyway.

Director Alan Govenar frames Jasper not only through the horror that made national headlines in 1998, but through the people who refused to let that be the final sentence. We meet elders and organizers whose lives have been shaped by segregation, disenfranchisement, and the grind of being asked to “move on.” The film’s title is literal: the voices are measured, firm, and rarely performative. You feel the thesis in their cadence—progress, if it holds, comes from neighbors stacking real moments until a counter-narrative becomes the town’s muscle memory.

There’s a particular flavor of crime thriller that thrives on the tension between ambition and inevitability — the moment when someone reaches for the big score even though every warning sign tells them they’re speeding into disaster. THE PERFECT GAMBLE fits that mold, focusing on two men who should know better yet charge into danger because the lure of control, validation, and reinvention is too strong to resist. It’s a story about building a future on unstable ground and hoping you can outrun the collapse. There is a very made-for-TV vibe to the film, but it works, in a nostalgic kind of way.

James Mangold’s 3:10 TO YUMA understands that the heart of a Western isn’t in the gunfire—it’s in the moments between shots, when a man decides what kind of person he wants to be. This 2007 remake of the 1957 classic transforms Elmore Leonard’s story into a human drama of conviction versus corruption, anchored by two powerhouse performances from Christian Bale and Russell Crowe.

There’s a quietly terrifying moment in adulthood when you realize people expect you to have a roadmap for who you are and what you want — and worse, that you’ve internalized those expectations without ever questioning whether they’re truly yours. (DON’T KNOW) HOW TO BE takes that moment and stretches it over one emotionally loaded evening, turning a birthday visit into a confrontation about identity, love, and what it means to exist confidently in a world where everyone thinks they know what’s best for you.

With a final frame that will stick with you forever, the strength of HAPPY BIRTHDAY lies in its quiet defiance. Sarah Goher’s feature debut unfolds in Cairo, where one girl’s attempt to celebrate her friend’s birthday becomes an act of resistance against an entire social order. What begins as a seemingly gentle story about childhood friendship soon reveals itself as something far more piercing — a confrontation with the invisible systems that define who is allowed to dream and who is not.

There’s a moment in A BEAR REMEMBERS that crystallizes what the film does best: it makes history feel like something you can reach out and touch — or something that might reach back. This 20-minute short transforms a simple idea into something emotional and haunting without ever resorting to spectacle. It’s a story about a mysterious sound troubling a remote village, but it resonates because it’s ultimately about what happens when the bonds that hold a community together begin to unravel, unnoticed.

STEAL THIS STORY, PLEASE! understands that journalism, at its best, is not a set of hot takes—it’s a muscle memory for asking difficult questions when the room would prefer silence. The film follows Amy Goodman across three decades of reporting and the daily grind, framing the Democracy Now! anchor not as a sainted outlier but as a working reporter who refuses to internalize the limits imposed by corporate consolidation, political intimidation, or apathy. Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin shape that vision into a narrative: a story about the persistence required to keep a public square open when the gatekeepers continually change the locks.

DECIBEL locks a musician and a music mogul in an isolated studio and asks a question the music business keeps dodging: what happens to soul when the system optimizes it? The premise is pointed—a promising musician, Scout, is invited to a high-tech recording sanctuary run by Donna, a brilliant, exacting figure who believes the future of music is less about blood and breath and more about training data and control (typical billionaire…). That setup isn’t just timely; it’s personal. Every scene feels like a negotiation between two incompatible definitions of creativity: one that accepts messiness, and one that treats mess as a bug to eliminate.

AFTER DARK is a compact morality play about what we owe a stranger when our instincts disagree. In ten minutes, it sets up a classic 'what would you do' scenario: a man on his way home meets a young woman who needs help getting to the station. He decides to walk with her. From there, the film becomes a tug-of-war between two impulses—compassion and self-protection—played out on quiet streets where every footstep sounds like a decision.

THE MASK is the rare studio comedy that fully understands its star as both actor and special effect. Jim Carrey’s face, posture, and body language were already a cultural event in 1994; this film turns that energy into its own premise. Stanley Ipkiss is a pushover with a kind heart and a habit of apologizing for occupying space. The mask he finds doesn’t create a different person; it detonates the person he’s been holding back, then paints him green and lets him sprint across the screen. That simple idea—your repressed self, set free—is what gives the movie its lasting power. The jokes go big, the gags go bigger, and yet the concept remains clear enough to anchor all the chaos.

The candy-colored surface of BUT I’M A CHEERLEADER hides more than you know. Jamie Babbit builds a world of bubblegum pastels and gender norms not to soften the story, but to sharpen it. Beneath the powder-blue lawns and Pepto-pink dorm rooms is a clear, pointed satire of “conversion therapy” and the cultural pressure to sand queer teens down into an acceptable shape.

There’s a quiet fire beneath BOYFIGHTER. Even as it keeps close to the bruised world of underground combat, it never lets violence define the characters’ worth. Julia Weisberg Cortés approaches the story not as a spectacle of fists and fights, but as a compassionate examination of how love, regret, and masculinity can become entangled into something that hurts even when it tries to protect. That unique perspective gives BOYFIGHTER a soul deeper than the genre typically offers.

THE RISING GIRLS OF K-POP: CONFIDENTIAL wants you to believe it’s cracking open a massive pop culture mystery. What it actually does is spend most of its runtime complaining about one of the most normal, unmysterious things in modern music: backing tracks.

PEACOCK is a dark, unsettling mirror held up to the modern performance of identity. It’s not simply a satire about role-playing; it’s a slow-motion implosion of a man who’s built his entire existence around being whoever others want him to be. Austrian filmmaker Bernhard Wenger’s feature captures the distorted comedy of self-erasure, a modern parable for the age of curated authenticity and algorithmic intimacy. The result is a smart, sharp piece of filmmaking that oscillates between humor and despair — a performance study wrapped in social commentary.

LITTLE AMÉLIE OR THE CHARACTER OF RAIN is a reminder that animation isn’t just a storytelling tool — it’s emotion with color. It’s what happens when you let art speak of memory, especially those first memories that never fully leave us. This is a film about a little girl learning how enormous life is, one moment at a time, and it uses animation to bring that realization to life in a way live-action never could.

PUT YOUR SOUL ON YOUR HAND AND WALK arrives with a story already aching inside it — a young woman whose life mattered, whose art demanded attention, and whose humanity insists on being remembered. That insistence is the backbone of Sepideh Farsi’s documentary. This film does not dramatize war so much as live inside it, through phone screens and connections that refuse to break even when everything else around them does.

he thing that makes 31 CANDLES engaging is this: it understands how much harder it is to change when you’re old enough to know better. Jonah Feingold plays Leo, a guy who skipped having a Bar Mitzvah at 13 and never quite shook the feeling that he left something unfinished. Now grown and stuck in the adult version of neutral — successful enough, charming enough, avoiding anything that might expose what he hasn’t figured out — he decides to finally accept the tradition he dodged, not as a punchline, but as a reckoning. The movie builds from a relatable place: when you’re tired of calling procrastination a personality trait, you have to do something uncomfortable.