Christmas with The Chosen: Holy Night (2023)

Not every film can make a shopping mall feel both magical and menacing, but Forbidden Fruits challenges that.

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. 

But what many do not know is that in 2019, a Wonder Woman film was released that had all of the positive qualities of WW84, and remedied many of the negative ones. Wonder Woman: Bloodlines, a direct-to-video animated movie in the DC Animated Movie Universe, perfectly balances the campiness and seriousness of the character.

Billy Eichner provides a hearty dose of good old fashioned romance with a lot of laughs

Typically in film, characters suffering from mental illness are used as plot devices or exaggerated for comedy. 'The House that Jack Built's representation exceeds in accuracy and realism of OCD.