The story of the friendship between Ioan and Michele respectively Romanian and Italian. The serendipitous encounter of two worlds apart: the travails of a young man, son of the Post-Communist Revolution, who flees his country in search of a better future and the travails of another youth who instead scrapes along the margins of a Western society that is unable to offer gainful employment to so much of its youth. In the background of this rapport between a simple Romanian youth and his marginalized Italian counterpart, there is a West which on one side is still reeling from the collapse of the Communist ideology and on the other, in the clutches of a Capitalist myth which has increasingly assumed, as it propulsive force, harsh competitiveness and an intensification of social inequality.
Shadow & Bone excels in natural story representation with powerful centering of culture. Jessie Mei Li stars as Alina Starkov, the feisty cartographer with kindness, innocence, and integrity, who comes to be revealed as the legendary summoner of light.
Battles will come and go and queer people do die for their identity and fights for rights, but that doesn’t mean the gays don’t deserve their happy endings in stories.
Mohit Suri’s Saiyaara (2025) is a soulful musical romance led by fresh faces Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda. A heartfelt tale of love, grief, and emotional healing that’s taking the Indian box office by storm.
Telling a story about the French and Indian Wars from the perspective of the British prioritizes the perspective of the colonizers.
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.
Women who pray together, play together. Very rarely would I describe a story about a group of punk rockers as “whimsical”, but such an engaging array of visual and comedic components make this stand-out new series the star that it is.
