Ten years ago, Ling Xuefeng visited Tibet to see his father and experienced a pure first love with a girl named Gesang Meiduo. A decade later, now a volunteer doctor, he returns to Tibet and meets a girl with the same name on the train—but she doesn’t recognize him. This new Meiduo becomes his assistant and translator, and helps him search for the girl from his past. As they journey together, they overcome cultural differences, societal expectations, and personal doubts, gradually rediscovering the innocence of that first love. What follows is a heartfelt romance between a Han Chinese man and a Tibetan woman, blooming like the legendary Gesang flower.
Growing up without a dad, I got a lot of my fatherly advice from the prototypes I saw on the silver screen. It’s these characters and films that gave me a glimpse into a dynamic I had never known but also made me realize that I was missing out. Here are my top 10 paternal films.
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.
The new biopic 'Elvis' highlights the beginning and end of the career of this rock and roll legend. The audience is taken on this journey knowing the tragic ending but not so much about what led him there. A large topic of discussion is the influences on Elvis that made him who he was as a singer, musician, and performer, which were blues, gospel, and country. Many of the songs that rose him to fame were songs by Black artists he heard growing up in primarily Black settings.
The newest in a long line of Cinderella adaptations, Amazon’s Cinderella (2021) prizes girlbossification above the very story it tries to adapt.
The Gates, John Burr’s new thriller film, is a disturbingly realistic portrayal of three Black twenty-somethings - Derek (Mason Gooding), Kevin (Algee Smith), and Tyon (Keith Powers), as they accidentally take a wrong turn into a gated community that’s more like a modern-day sundown town. The three friends witness a variety of crimes in their new surroundings, including an attempted homicide and an attempted rape. As they attempt to alert the authorities and do the right thing, they are thwarted at every turn by the worst horror stories of American conservatism - racist white suburbanites, reckless gun violence, corrupt police, religious mania, and a megalomaniacal pastor.
A young girl named Copi and her pet dog Xico travel into the mountain when they hear that something's not right.
