'The Harder They Fall': This Ain’t Your Grandma’s Spaghetti Western
In Jeymes Samuel's history-infused, neo-spaghetti western, Black women are center stage with a fresh hip hop mixtape keeping rhythm in the backdrop.

A documentary film dedicated to Galina Andrusenko, a courageous 17-year-old girl who organized the Amur-Nizhnedneprovsky Komsomol underground in occupied Dnepropetrovsk.
In Jeymes Samuel's history-infused, neo-spaghetti western, Black women are center stage with a fresh hip hop mixtape keeping rhythm in the backdrop.
Despite its glaring flaws, First Girl I Loved is not entirely undeserving of a watch. For people who can handle the more difficult aspects of the story and graphic scenes, it is worth looking into. It’s not a film worthy of rewatch, but it may still resonate somewhat with those who need a story like this. It is a genuine, if flimsy attempt at a coming-of-age tale. Were the film to be directed by someone with experiences more similar to Anne, it would likely be more powerful--as it is, it feels like a man’s perspective of what it means to come to terms with your identity as a lesbian.
My review’s title is a nod to Shakespeare and is entirely deliberate. The original movie portrayed the high-end fashion world as a brutal arena of plotting, backstabbing, and betrayal, and most Shakespeare’s plays depend on these plot devices. The Devil Wears Prada 2 uses the same formula, and is, plot-wise, almost identical. Once again, we plunge into the cutthroat world of Runway, where to get and stay at the top, you must let go of your principles and moral sense. The only thing different is that due to the digital era, Runway is not a print magazine anymore, but one that is running online.
Its predictability shouldn’t distract from the enjoyment that the pure cinematic imagination behind the camera elicits. It is a movie of crises both moral and mortal, oozing with CGI, and thoroughly enjoyable.
Two movies that do a fantastic job in conveying the ongoing struggle for racial justice are Selma (2014) and Just Mercy (2019).
Naked Gun: The New Police Squad Team delivers exactly what fans want: relentless, expertly crafted chaos that honors the original while cranking everything up to eleven. The gags fire at machine-gun pace—sight jokes layered with wordplay and physical comedy so outrageous it borders on art. It's gleefully self-aware without being cynical, silly without being stupid, and maintains that perfect ZAZ-style balance of treating absolute absurdity with complete seriousness. The film knows exactly what it is: a comedy missile designed for maximum laughs, and it hits its target with surgical precision. Pure, unhinged entertainment that proves spoof comedy still has plenty of life left in it.