First Time (2023)

This coming-of-age Mexican movie is about a group of school children who fulfill their dreams.

I was able to watch the gleefully mesmerizing Disney remake that was Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio. I was enthralled by Zemeckis’ iteration. 

Two Distant Strangers (2020) centers around Carter James (Joey Bada$$) as he tries to get back home to his pitbull, Jeter, after spending a night at the apartment of his date Perri (Zaria Simone). What gets in the way of Carter reuniting with his dog is that every time he tries to leave Perri’s apartment,  he is killed by police and wakes up back in her bed in a never-ending cycle. It addresses the issue of police brutality which rightly has been in the public eye more and more with the unjust deaths caused at the hands of law enforcement.

These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.

I understand that this would have been consistent with the language used by that generation, due to its role in the medical profession, however as someone who has family members with Down Syndrome I took it very personally.

Bong Joon Ho’s masterpiece, Parasite (2019) became one of the few international films to break into the American mainstream.