Here Comes a 'Spirited' Christmas
Spirited inverts the tropes of the holiday musical genre to update an age-old tale for 2022. It's a paean to those who make grand spectacles possible.

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.
Spirited inverts the tropes of the holiday musical genre to update an age-old tale for 2022. It's a paean to those who make grand spectacles possible.
These openly gay Hollywood figures risked so much by being honest about their sexuality: judgment, loss of employment, hate – even violence and death.
A recent look at gender and racial diversity in film shows some signs of progress. However, white men still make up the vast majority of actors and directors in top-grossing films.
Films about casinos have long been a favorite of Hollywood. This is unsurprising, as they're often tied to magnetic characters whose lives revolve around luxury, spectacle, and even danger.
The French-born director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s strategic choice to entrust the interpretation of a conventional, feminine character to a non-binary actor pays off: Corrin’s Lady Chatterley is awkward, edgy, and uninhibited at the same time.
While this film thinks that it is diagnosing the cause, it is merely diagnosing a symptom instead.