New Releases for August 26 2025

CITY ON FIRE (1987)

Ko Chow is an undercover cop torn between his duty as a police officer and his loyalty to his friends on the wrong side of the law. He wants out – and his commanding officer Inspector Lau reluctantly approves his resignation – but only after he completes one final assignment. Tasked with infiltrating a notorious gang of criminals, Chow bonds with their leader (Danny Lee, The Killer), building a relationship based on mutual trust and respect. But when a planned heist turns into a violent shootout with the law, the tension among the thieves heats up … and they begin to suspect there is an informant in their midst. (BLU-RAY + 4K)

MIXED BLOOD (1985)

Rita la Punta (Marília Pêra, Central Station), a Brazilian single mother living in New York's Alphabet City, resides with her drug-dealing son Thiago (Richard Ulacia) and his gang of teenage delinquents. In an attempt to control the drug trade below 14th Street, Rita goes against the leader of a rival neighborhood gang, Juan the Bullet (Angel David, The Crow), spurring a turf war. When Carol (Linda Kerridge, Fade to Black), a friend of a drug lord known as The German (Ulrich Berr, Beethoven's Nephew), expresses an interest in Thiago, things become even more complicated.

Written and directed by NYC art scene, and exploitation cinema luminary Paul Morrissey, MIXED BLOOD is a characteristically grimy descent into urban malaise that is often punctuated by moments of gallows humor. Featuring an eclectic ensemble cast that includes the screen debut of John Leguizamo (Summer of Sam) and Warhol superstar Geraldine Smith (Flesh, Bad), MIXED BLOOD is an essential, but often overlooked, entry into the canon of independent films made on the streets of New York in the 1980s. (BLU-RAY + 4K)

COMPENSATION (1999) (Criteron Collection)

A poignant portrait of Deaf African Americans and the complexities of love at both ends of the twentieth century, Zeinabu irene Davis’s film is a groundbreaking story of inclusion and visibility. In dual performances, Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks play an educated dressmaker and an illiterate migrant in 1910s Chicago, and a resilient graphic artist and an endearing librarian living in the same city eight decades later. Employing archival photography, an original score blending ragtime and African percussion, and lyrical editing, Davis deftly intertwines the two couple’s stories, in ways both tender and tragic. Compensation is a landmark of American independent cinema that confronts the social forces and prejudices that hinder love. (BLU-RAY and DVD)

LILO & STITCH (2025)

Experience this funny and touching live-action reimagining of Disney's animated classic. When a lonely girl named Lilo adopts Stitch, an alien "puppy," Stitch helps to mend Lilo's broken family — but not without wreaking hilarious havoc on the Hawaiian Islands. (BLU-RAY and DVD)

VERMIGLIO (2024)

Secrets swirl beneath the surface of a remote Italian community in Maura Delpero’s exquisite wartime drama, winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize. In a majestic Alpine village touched only faintly by the upheavals of modern life, a strict schoolteacher’s family undergoes a profound shift when a relative returns home with a mysterious Sicilian soldier, both fleeing the front lines of World War II. As the seasons change across a single year, three very different daughters of the sprawling Graziadei clan will find their lives transformed. Blending historically grounded realism with painterly grace, Delpero draws from her own ancestral history for Vermiglio, an at once intimate and momentous vision of a world suspended between the patriarchal past and the stirrings of a new future. (BLU-RAY and DVD)