
What we present to the world is a carefully curated version of reality. Girls Will Be is a powerful visual meditation on this topic, exploring the all too au courant themes of image obsession, social pressure, and shame. This "anti-fashion" fashion film eschews traditional narrative structure, instead presenting viewers with a dreamy tableau that viscerally juxtaposes the "perfect" images rampant on social media with the grotesque reality that often lurks beneath these lovely facades. In Girls Will Be, viewers get an uncomfortably firsthand close-up of the loss of innocence of a teen girl as her desire to be accepted by peers—and by extension society— makes her vulnerable to their perversely warped value system.
"There is something going on between us that I cannot unravel."
James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) marks the beginning of a wonderful two-part arc, brimming with style and substance. The film follows Sarah Connor, a waitress living in Los Angeles. One night, a cybernetic organism (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back in time to kill Sarah. A human resistance fighter (Michael Biehn) is also sent back in time, with the intent of saving Sarah from this deadly foe.
"First Day" is a trans kid slice-of-life tv show that brings desperately needed diversity to coming-of-age stories in mainstream media. Here's a show that get's it right by having a trans actress in a story centered on trans girlhood.
"Rodgers' & Hammerstein's Cinderella" wasn’t just a fairytale, it's a Black girl's fairytale. It was a fantasy world where the undeniable beauty of Black girls and Women was celebrated and beloved.
What makes the lighting in Casablanca even more impressive is how it reflects the emotional states of the characters without needing explicit dialogue.