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In fifteen minutes, TRAPPED builds genuine tension, explores layered social commentary, and leaves you thinking long after the credits. Directed, written, and produced by brothers Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz, the short turns an ordinary high school janitor’s shift into a nightmare of escalating peril. But beneath the suspense lies something more penetrating—a critique of power, privilege, and how the smallest choices reveal who society protects and who it doesn’t.

PISTACHIO WARS peels back California’s agricultural facade and reveals something far more unsettling beneath the orchards. Directed and written by Yasha Levine and Rowan Wernham, the investigative documentary follows the trail of corporate greed that turns the state’s natural resources into a luxury commodity. What begins as a straightforward inquiry into a small water deal evolves into a sweeping, damning examination of power, branding, and the privatization of something as essential as life itself.

THE DEMON’S ROOK is the kind of horror artifact that earns its place on a late-night shelf through sheer willpower. Made on weekends with a group of friends, cast in latex and fog, and pointed squarely at anyone who missed the hand-built monsters, it’s an oddity that wears its influence proudly. You can feel the lineage: nightmares, ritual nonsense that plays like a dare, and a devotion to practical effects that puts much pricier productions to shame. On those terms, it’s a blast—an unruly parade of demons, zombies, slime, and the occult that proves enthusiasm can do a lot of heavy lifting.

SUNFISH (& OTHER STORIES ON GREEN LAKE) is a soft-spoken anthology with a backbone. It moves with the logic of a true summer—people arrive, drift into each other’s worlds, and leave changed in ways they won’t fully understand until later. Across four interlocking stories, the film treats the lake not as scenery but as the constant: a place where lessons are learned, responsibilities sneak up on kids and adults alike, and every victory feels earned because it’s so small you could miss it if you blinked. Sierra Falconer writes and directs with a confidence that favors presence over plot; the film is less about what happens than how it settles in your chest after.

There are reinterpretations — and then there are works that claim a legacy as their own. Edge of Paradise’s REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (AND THE ANGELS OF STATIC) belongs to the latter: a full-scale metamorphosis of Clint Mansell’s immortal composition into a new cinematic-like experience. Where the original thrives on restraint and creeping dread, this version detonates with emotion and a sense of dimensional scale. The band amplifies the theme’s darkness and wonder, forging a sound that feels equally suited for the stage and screen. This isn’t a homage — it’s an ascension, transforming a cultural touchstone into something fiercely personal, visual, and unmistakably their own.

When memory becomes a commodity, truth is no longer sacred—it’s transactional. That’s the unsettling premise behind FALSEHOOD, a high-concept Canadian sci-fi thriller from director Ethan Hickey. While ambitious and full of provocative ideas, the film occasionally leans too heavily on its philosophical framing. Still, there’s no denying its scope. For a low-budget production, it manages to feel expansive, polished, and politically charged, threading personal drama through a near-future narrative steeped in surveillance, power, and faith.

The marketing tagline promised “HIGH NOON in space,” but that undersells what OUTLAND actually achieves. Peter Hyams takes the bones of a Western—one good man against an empire of corruption—and transplants it to a mining colony orbiting Jupiter’s moon Io. It’s as bleak as it sounds: six hundred million miles from home, the air is synthetic, the work is brutal, and every worker is disposable. The colony, Con-Am 27, has the energy of a late-stage capitalist nightmare. Productivity is worshipped, human life is collateral, and one man dares to ask why miners keep dying in such spectacular, gruesome ways.

If there’s one thing Jess Franco could always do, it was find the line between camp and sleaze—and dance across the line with a grin. DEATH PACKS A SUITCASE (also known as Der Todesrächer von Soho or The Avenger of Soho) is one of the director’s stranger entries: a playful, oddly clean-cut mystery with all the hallmarks of German “Krimi” cinema and just enough Franco flavor to keep it weird. For an artist better known for erotic exploitation and psychotropic nightmares, this 1972 London-set whodunit feels like a weekend vacation—blood light but heavy on personality.

There’s a moment in AI WEIWEI’S TURANDOT when art and activism stop being separate entities and merge into something entirely new, for Ai Weiwei, whose career has always been an act of rebellion, directing an opera feels both unexpected and inevitable. The artist who once dropped a 2,000-year-old urn in the name of challenging authority now orchestrates Puccini’s Turandot inside the Rome Opera House—turning one of Western culture’s grandest traditions into a living statement on censorship, humanity, and power.

WALK WITH ME is exactly what its title promises: an invitation to stay present as a marriage reshapes itself around early-onset Alzheimer’s. Shot over four years by filmmaker and casting director Heidi Levitt, the film tracks her husband, Charlie Hess—an artist, father, and community builder—through the incremental changes that a diagnosis brings. There’s no manufactured drama here. Instead, we get the paces of real life: clinic visits, family conversations, small victories, and the tougher days when words slip, plans falter, and the world narrows. The honesty of that approach is the documentary’s power. It doesn’t explain Alzheimer’s so much as it lets you inhabit its slow encroachment, moment by moment.

THE WRONG ARM OF THE LAW sits in that distinct pocket where caper mechanics and manners share top billing. A crew of impostors dressed as police keeps robbing the robbers, forcing London’s crooks and the Yard to cooperate just to restore the “proper” order of things. That inversion is where the film lives—less in a belly-laugh sort of way and more in the absurdity of villains and cops negotiating work rules like rival trade unions.

OLIVE is that rare short film that doesn’t feel confined by time. Thirteen minutes pass, but it leaves an emotional afterglow that lingers like a full-length drama etched into your mind. Written, directed, and co-starring Tom Koch, it’s an intimate portrayal of love, loss, and identity through the lens of Alzheimer’s. This isn’t a film about the disease itself — it’s about the humanity caught inside. And with Lesley Ann Warren delivering a performance of astonishing grace, OLIVE stands as one of the year’s most powerful achievements in short-form storytelling.