It is the night of March 25, 1949. A full moon hangs over Estonia. Endless rows of cattle cars are waiting to transport thousands of Estonian families, asleep in their homes, to Siberia. The Stalinist regime is ready to treat people like animals.
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.
Love, Simon (2018) based on the book “Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda” (by Becky Albertalli) is a teen LGBTQ+ rom-com with themes of longing to find others with similar struggles, and ultimately is a story of acceptance of identity from those around you, and most importantly, from yourself.
Gritty and bleak are the best words to describe this film. There’s nothing happy about it.
One Night in Miami... did not frame the racism and bigotry as something that could be solved by quality time spent between individuals. Instead, it featured four different legends of Black History together in one room disagreeing for about 2/3 of the film.
Keep scrolling to find names that should become part of your watchlist!
