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.

It takes a special kind of lunatic devotion to remake The Toxic Avenger—a 1984 splatter-comedy so proudly grotesque it made most of its audience feel like they’d contracted something. But writer-director Macon Blair, long-time collaborator and protégé of Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, Green Room), clearly didn’t just grow up watching Troma films—he absorbed them like toxic sludge through his veins. And his version isn’t some glossy studio sanitisation; it’s a full-throttle, fan-made fever dream that somehow manages to respect the filth while upgrading it to something absurdly cinematic.

The Hook - Thomas Beatty | Runtime: 95 Minutes | Genre: Dark Comedy/Drama

Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest arrives not as a quiet homage but as a theatrical proclamation: a loud, colour-saturated reworking of Kurosawa’s High and Low that trades the original’s surgical restraint for spectacle. On paper the ingredients are promising — Denzel Washington returning to Lee’s orbit, a city-sized moral dilemma, and the director’s appetite for music, race and swagger. In practice the film too often substitutes signal for nuance: big gestures where small ones were required, anthemic “coolness” where moral complexity might have lived, and a directorial itch to be seen as culturally vital that winds up feeling performative.

Seth Worley’s "Sketch" is the kind of film that sneaks up on you. You sit down expecting a quirky family adventure, and what you get instead is something far richer: a story about grief, imagination, and the fragile ways families try to hold themselves together after loss. It’s magical, yes, but not in the glossy sense. Its magic comes from honesty—the kind that trusts both children and adults to handle big feelings without softening them into something tidy.

Ari Aster has always made films that resist comfort. He delights in pulling the rug from beneath us, not just in terms of story but in our very expectations of cinema. "Hereditary" and "Midsommar" made grief and ritualistic violence operatic, while "Beau Is Afraid" tested patience by refusing to settle into anything recognisable. With "Eddington," Aster has delivered something that feels at once familiar in his trajectory and yet even more divisive: a sprawling, cynical satire disguised as a western, where the pandemic lingers as a ghost and America’s cultural fractures are pried open for examination. It is audacious, often incisive, and sometimes flat-out infuriating.

In Michael Shanks’ debut feature "Together," love is neither a candlelit dinner nor a simple fight about dirty dishes. It’s a living, writhing organism that seeps into bone marrow, clings to flesh, and—when neglected—mutates into something ravenous and unspeakable. This is a horror film in the truest sense: not about monsters lurking outside the window, but the terror of sharing every breath, every mistake, every inch of your skin with someone you can no longer entirely recognize, yet still depend on.