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THE BETRAYAL begins with a single decision that sets everything else in motion. A loyal warrior is asked to shoulder a false charge of murder to shield his clan from political fallout. He accepts with the understanding that he’ll go into hiding for a year and then be welcomed back once the storm has passed. But what sounds like a temporary sacrifice quickly mutates into a permanent exile. Promises evaporate, protections vanish, and the clan that asked for loyalty quietly abandons him. From that point on, the film is less about one man’s mistake than about how an entire system uses honor as both carrot and weapon.

The best way to approach these companion pieces is to imagine two visits to the same corner—same storefront, same faces drifting in and out—but on different days of the week. One day is all about listening; the next is about letting the room talk. SMOKE is the quiet one: a neighborhood drama that sneaks up on you through ordinary conversation and the small rituals that give people meaning. BLUE IN THE FACE is the loud cousin: faster, looser, full of diversions and drop-ins that feel like a street party. Put together, they celebrate how a place can organize a life, and how a life can reorganize a place.

Sometimes film history gets shaped by accident, and FRANKENSTEIN’S BLOODY TERROR is proof of that. Though the title suggests another spin on Mary Shelley’s creation, this Spanish horror oddity has nothing to do with Frankenstein. Instead, it introduces the character that would define Paul Naschy’s career: Waldemar Daninsky, a doomed nobleman cursed to transform into a werewolf. The bait-and-switch title was a marketing decision for its U.S. release, designed to satisfy distributors who wanted something with “Frankenstein” and “Terror” in the name. The result is a film that has long confused casual viewers but has delighted cult fans, especially now that Kino Lorber has brought it back in a new 3-D restoration.

The premise is loaded: an undocumented man on the edge of removal bumps into the friend he hasn’t figured out how to forgive. From there, the film doesn’t sprint so much as strings its way through a minefield of deadlines, affidavits, and unspoken history. The stakes are public and timely—immigration court, paperwork that can erase a life with a rubber stamp—but the movie stays resolutely personal. It treats policy as weather: always present, occasionally catastrophic, but most felt in the way people adjust their plans and measure their hopes.

LOS GOLFOS doesn’t ask for nostalgia or redemption; it asks you to sit with a city that never noticed these kids until it needed to punish them. Carlos Saura’s first feature drops you in Madrid’s postwar margins, where a brotherhood of teens drifts between odd jobs, minor scores, and the kind of plans that feel big only because the wallet is empty. The script is deception, raising money so one of them can enter a bullfighting competition, the one “profession” that looks like a ladder out of poverty. The simplicity is the point. When survival is the day’s only plot, even a small goal becomes epic.

The promise here is simple and potent: two delinquents grow into power together and pay for it together. FLAMING BROTHERS doesn’t chase reinvention so much as it hunts for sincerity inside a well-worn outline—loyalty vs. ambition, brotherhood vs. survival. What makes it click, even when it stumbles, is the alchemy between a star in full bloom and a script that’s quietly sketching the bones of themes its writer would later obsess over.

A story set in Mallorca, Spain, could easily fall into postcard simplicity, but FORASTERA bends that toward something more unsettling. Lucía Aleñar Iglesias utilizes her debut feature to craft an atmosphere where grief, adolescence, and memory intertwine, becoming indistinguishable from one another. It is a coming-of-age film that never feels conventional—grief isn’t a backdrop here but a force that shapes identity, distorting how family members see one another and, in turn, themselves.

Larry the Cable Guy has built a career on the unlikely marriage of down-home humor and edgy but warm comedy, and his latest stand-up special proves he hasn’t lost the knack. Filmed at Florida’s historic Capitol Theater, IT’S A GIFT finds him returning to the stage with the same everyman persona that first made him a household name. While some comedians reinvent themselves with every outing, Larry leans into consistency—his voice, both literal and comedic, remains as unmistakable as ever.

DAKOTA is a film defined by obsession—both in the story it tells and the story behind its making. At its center is Dick de Boer, played with conviction by Kees Brusse, a Dutch pilot whose life is tethered to his DC-3 Dakota. For Dick, flying isn’t just an occupation; it’s survival, compulsion, and the only place he seems to feel alive. That singular fixation gives the movie its shape, even when production chaos nearly brought it to a halt.

Few trilogies define a filmmaker’s voice as directly as Nicolas Winding Refn’s PUSHER films. Spanning a decade, these three entries chart Copenhagen’s criminal underworld from shifting perspectives: the hustler scrambling for survival, the screw-up desperate for respect, and the kingpin watching his empire crumble. Each film stands alone, but together they paint a panorama of power, desperation, and inevitability that lingers long after the credits roll.

Now and then, a film comes along that isn’t defined by its creature design, its chase sequences, or even its premise, but instead by the performance at its center. XENO is one of those films. For all its polish and high-concept pitch, what ultimately makes the movie land is Lulu Wilson. She anchors the story with a performance that radiates both heart and grit, carrying every scene with a natural presence.

History rarely gives us clean accounts. Some moments are captured in countless reels of film, studied and revisited until they become cultural touchstones. Others slip into silence, either ignored, erased, or deemed too dangerous to remember. NI-NAADAMAADIZ: RED POWER RISING faces that silence head-on, reconstructing a 1974 Indigenous youth-led occupation in Kenora, Ontario, from just eight surviving minutes of archival footage. What could have been another forgotten protest instead becomes a vivid retelling, crafted with purpose by director Shane Belcourt and journalist-producer Tanya Talaga.

HELLBENDER is the rare micro-budget indie that treats constraint as an invitation. What begins as a portrait of a teen and her mother making loud, messy music in the woods steadily reveals itself as a story about inheritance—what we protect our kids from, what we pass down anyway, and the dangerous thrill of figuring out who you are when every rule you’ve been given stops making sense. The Adams family—John, Toby Poser, and daughters Zelda and Lulu—built a world with their own hands, and the film is strongest exactly where that do-it-yourself confidence and intimacy are allowed to run wild.

This film does something unique, shining a spotlight on Bunny Yeager—model, photographer, entrepreneur—whose fingerprints are all over mid-century American pop culture even if her name isn’t. Rather than building a biography, the documentary assembles a persuasive, steadily layered case: Yeager’s images didn’t just decorate the era; they helped to create it. The work popularized the bikini and elevated the image of Bettie Page. It molded the 1950s pin-up into something both sharper, nudging a country inching toward social change to confront who controls the image of women and why.

In just nineteen minutes, RIPE achieves what many features spend an hour or two chasing: a world thick with history and spiritual resonance. Writer-director Solara Thanh Bình Đặng roots the film in the Mekong Delta, an ecological crossroads where fertility and precarity intertwine. The story follows a young woman faced with a decision that has shaped generations before her—whether to accept an arranged marriage for the sake of her family’s farm. What could read as a familiar coming-of-age negotiation is refracted through a lens, where the land itself and unseen forces press against her choice.