Ben-Hur: The Making of an Epic (1993)

Intergenerational friendships and community can be so powerful, and this was a great example.

This year, in light of the pandemic and the inability to gather with our loved ones, a few of our staff members reviewed their favorite holiday films with the hope of recreating some of the sentimentality that reminds us of home.

Juneteenth is a day to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States on June 19th, 1865. We did it! Everyone is free! Everyone is equal! End of story, right?

Some people’s first introduction to Mira Nair might be as New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s mom. But with her insightful direction of 1991’s Mississippi Masala, Nair shows how much she deserves to be known as an artist. Delivering a nuanced portrait of a romance between a Black man and an Indian woman living in the South, Nair explores the complications each character faces, giving both equal weight.

It doesn’t offer an absolute answer for the dialectical ethical questions that emerged in search of justice but portrays the characters as living people beyond the identities of victims.

"Come Play" was entertaining and had some great ideas about how to scare children away from playing with facial recognition settings.