BITE DOWN (2025)

Given Hollywood's history of racism and financial motivations, how much progress can we expect? Plus: a list of excellent films by Black directors.

Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing is a gritty, darkly funny thrill ride through 1998 New York, with Austin Butler delivering a raw, magnetic turn as Hank Thompson—a washed-up ex-ballplayer turned bartender whose life implodes after cat-sitting for his punk neighbor drags him into a violent underworld of gangsters, crooked cops, and chaos. Brutal yet unexpectedly hilarious, the film blends noir grit with midnight-movie absurdity, proving Aronofsky can reinvent himself while Butler cements his status as a true movie star.

“Candyman ain't a 'he.’ Candyman is the whole damn hive." Candyman represents all Black victims of white supremacy, and this art form narratively conveys it in a succinct, adulatory way, the history of which is rare to find.

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.

Spirited inverts the tropes of the holiday musical genre to update an age-old tale for 2022. It's a paean to those who make grand spectacles possible.

Canvas illustrates the story of a grandfather who, after suffering the loss of his beloved, struggles to reclaim his love for painting.