The Geek Show

They’ll never make me believe physical media is dead when packages like this exist. Specifically, I mean packages where the extras justify the price of the entire set on their own. The Golestan Film Studio was an independent studio established by Ebrahim Golestan in Shah-era Iran, one of the earliest such institutions in the country. All but one of the films in this collection predate The Cow, Darius Mehrjui’s 1969 film that’s usually cited as the starting point of the Iranian New Wave.

Among the many extras on discs two and three of Radiance Films’s Blu-Ray of Jean-Luc Godard’s Historie(s) du cinéma, there is a whole feature-length film. Chosen Moments from Histoire(s) du cinéma is exactly what it sounds like, a 2001 compression of the eight episodes into an eighty-minute film.

It’s the question on everyone’s minds whenever a suspenseful thriller gets a sequel: how will you engineer the same suspense without it coming across as completely contrived? How will you make sure that the people of Amity Island will ignore Chief Brody’s concerns yet again when another shark comes to their shores? How do you get Sandra Bullock on another form of transport that’s been commandeered by evil masterminds?

Jean-Luc Godard’s Historie(s) du cinéma, released on Blu-Ray in a limited edition extras-packed set by Radiance, is many things, but one of the things it isn’t is a history of cinema. The title is one of the bilingual puns Godard always delighted in, not least because they exclude monoglots from fully comprehending his work. Chapter 1B, the closing half of the first of four interlinked pairs of episodes that make up the Historie(s) du cinéma project, spells it out: “You have a story here.

It sounds like a horror movie, but it isn’t – well, not in a genre sense. The new Blu-Ray from Second Run is a film whose restoration was partly the work of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, partly the work of George Lucas’s Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation and partly the result of Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation. Dungarpur may be the less famous name there but he’s the most important in terms of what to expect.

Coming to Blu-ray this week via the Transmission/Radiance label is Joe, a corrosive satire on the generational conflict in late 1960s/early 70s America. Written by Norman Wexler (Serpico, Saturday Night Fever) and directed by John G. Avildsen (Rocky, The Karate Kid), the film stars Peter Boyle as the eponymous Joe, a racist blue collar schlub who holds nothing but fear and contempt for the younger generation. It also features Susan Sarandon in her big screen debut.

John Adams, Toby Poser and their daughters Zelda and Lulu have become something of an anomaly in American indie filmmaking as they’ve carved out a genuinely self‑sustaining creative ecosystem: shooting everything themselves, sharing duties across the family, and building films from the ground up with a DIY ethos that never feels compromised.

Back in 2021, before I started writing for The Geek Show, I received an Instagram DM from a 17-year-old transfem filmmaker from Australia named Alice Maio Mackay, who had just completed her first feature film and wanted to share it with as many transgender people on the horror scene as she could; that film was So Vam (2021).

FrightFest is typically full of guest filmmakers, speakers and actors, all arranged well in advance – and then there’s Larry Fessenden, who arrived at the screening of his new film Trauma or, Monsters All unannounced for a surprise Q&A.

I’d heard a lot of hype about GRIND from its American festival run, and as someone already a fan of Brea Grant’s directorial work, I went in curious but without fixed expectations — anthologies haven’t exactly been in their halcyon era lately. What I got was one of the most purely enjoyable experiences of this year’s FrightFest, and festival screenings for 2026 in general.