Back and We Ate You 

Perhaps the most amazing and groundbreaking quality about The Birdcage is how removed it is from both illness and insensitivity. Whereas films preceding it were often somber stories about the tribulations of being gay in a conservatively straight world, Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May expose the fallacies of conservatism as traditional values are thrown into a more open-minded space. They don’t care how far the community has fallen so much as how high they can rebuild themselves.

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.

The problem isn’t that it’s bad. It's good. But it fails to stand out from a crowd of similar films.

A brief look at two Barry Jenkins films that have established him as one of the greatest filmmakers of our time.

Juno is extremely funny, very well-written, and contains great performances. The film is also about a very important topic, one that is extremely relevant now: women’s reproductive rights. Is this Oscar-winning film spreading a pro-life or pro-choice message to its audience?

In Jeymes Samuel's history-infused, neo-spaghetti western, Black women are center stage with a fresh hip hop mixtape keeping rhythm in the backdrop.