A House of Your Dreams (2006)

This current year, as well as the past several, has seen a slowly building increase in something the horror genre has required for quite a while in this critic's opinion...originality. I've stated before that I am very hard to please when it comes to this vein of the film industry's offerings, always leaning more towards that which sends chills through my very being in lieu of buckets of blood and gore.

I write for a diversity-focused film review blog, so I’ll be honest: I really wanted to like Pretty Lethal. Starring Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, Avantika, and Millicent Simmonds, Amazon Prime’s new thriller seemed like it would be a girl power movie about dancers with a horror action twist. Sort of a Suspiria for teens. But with shallow and unlikeable characters, a confusing plot, an overreliance on violence, and cringey dialogue, any fun the movie started out with was quickly lost. What was left was a faint echo of greater horror movies about dancers made before. 

The clever but socially-awkward Tetê joins a new school, and she'll do anything to fit in.

KIMI is the main character of this film and as much as I wish it was Angela Childs played by Zoe Kravitz, it isn't. KIMI is a smart device that works not unlike Amazon's Alexa and Google's Nest assisting in anything from home purchases to music playing all under the guise of only activating when in use.

Marvel's Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur shine as they battle their way through supervillains, social issues, and school bullies on the Lower East Side. Moon girl magic in the moonlight! A must-see for all Marvel and fantasy/science fiction fans.

Stand and Deliver is an inspirational classic from 1988 starring Edward James Olmos as Jaime Escalante, and his class of rag tag students in East Los Angeles. It’s the story of how a new teacher shows a motley group of students in the inner city with backgrounds as gang members, dishwashers, and mechanics — the power of self-determination. He teaches the teenagers to believe in themselves through algebra and calculus.