MovieFestUK

There are films that thrill, films that entertain, and then there are films that slowly peel back the skin of human desire until all that’s left is the raw, quivering truth beneath. Lurkerdoesn’t chase shocks or cheap spectacle; it creeps into your conscience, whispering in places you didn’t know were vulnerable. It lives in the spaces between admiration and obsession, ambition and self-erasure, loneliness and the violent hunger to be seen. What begins as a story about a young filmmaker attaching himself to a rising musician transforms into something far darker—a study of complicity, performance, and the quiet savagery of longing.

I went into "Code 3" expecting a light buddy-comedy with some heart. What I got instead was a relentlessly intense, stomach-churning plunge into the fractured world of paramedics—one that earns its laughs and wears its anxiety on its sleeve.

Perhaps the most striking quality of "One Battle After Another"is the precision with which Paul Thomas Anderson controls his narrative—he seems to know instinctively when to push forward and when to pull back, what to expose, and what to let breathe. The film surges into life with Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills, a spark of volatile passion and moral contradiction, and then shifts elsewhere, allowing the fallout from her radical life to echo and evolve through characters like Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), Willa (Chase Infiniti), Lockjaw (Sean Penn), Benicio Del Toro’s sensei, and the institutional monoliths they’re all up against. What Anderson achieves is not just a story, but a compound tension: between idealism and compromise, between violent resistance and its costs, between past revolutions and a future that inherits both their hopes and their failures.

There are films that politely observe grief from a safe distance, and then there are films like Twinless—the sort that climb inside your ribcage, rummage around in the vulnerable bits, and dare you to keep breathing. It’s a pitch-black comedy that moves with the pulse of a ghost: warm one moment, cruel the next, always haunted by the ache of what’s missing. It shouldn’t work—grief and humour aren’t supposed to hold hands this tightly—but James Sweeney directs with such fearless emotional clarity that the tightrope never snaps.

There’s something profoundly unsettling about watching grief take form — not metaphorically, but literally. In "The Thing With Feathers," that form is a hulking, feathered creature: part nightmare, part companion, part mirror. It emerges from the imagination of a broken man, and yet it feels as if it was always there, circling him, waiting. Adapted from Max Porter’s poetic novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Dylan Southern’s film is less a story than a psychological haunting — a reckoning with sorrow so consuming that it begins to mutate into its own living thing.

Darren Aronofsky has always filmed obsession like a sickness — an infection of the mind that spreads until there’s nothing left but ruin. In "Caught Stealing," that same fever burns through comedy instead of despair. It’s a film built on pure escalation — a comedy of errors disguised as a crime thriller, where bad luck metastasises into destiny, and one man’s ordinary life collapses under the absurd weight of consequence.