What Does a Sympathetic Portrayal of Sexual Assault on Screen Look Like?
As Sexual Assault Awareness Month comes to an end, I’d like to urge viewers and filmmakers to take a long and hard look at how rape is portrayed on screen.

As Sexual Assault Awareness Month comes to an end, I’d like to urge viewers and filmmakers to take a long and hard look at how rape is portrayed on screen.
Outer Banks (2020-) knows its audience: young adults in a country that can’t stop romanticizing good ole’ treasure hunts. Add a little of Riverdale’s (2017-) sex appeal, and no one can look away. Forty years after The Goonies (1985) America’s consciousness hasn’t strayed from the same tropes: treasure hunts, a vulnerable white male lead, and the whitewashing of a racially segregated setting.
In The Women and the Murderer, directors Mona Achache and Patricia Tourancheau center women—the very demographic true crime is designed to appeal to.
"His Girl Friday" set the bar for romcoms and gave us a feminist heroine before feminism was cool.
This 2023 film serves as the final chapter of the Indiana Jones franchise.
Although bogged down by a slow pace and moralistic intent, ‘Deadly Garage Sale’ (2022) makes the most of its silly and nonsensical premise.