'Pain Hustlers' (2023): An Opioid Crisis
What starts off as a success story for a single mother living below the poverty line, slowly begins to weave itself into a tangled web of greed, guilt, and destruction.

A ghostly visitor with a shocking secret, a daughter devastated by loss, a deadly duel – and the most famous question in all of drama. Just some of the reasons why Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy will hold you spellbound.
What starts off as a success story for a single mother living below the poverty line, slowly begins to weave itself into a tangled web of greed, guilt, and destruction.
I have no idea how getting an abortion is still not a basic right at this point, but that means the fight is far from over. So, films like Happening are ever-relevant.
There’s no two ways about it — Bridgerton is horny. Shondaland’s newest venture- released on Netflix on Christmas- is certainly a spectacle to behold, just as the premise; essentially an Austenian, Regency-Era Gossip Girl, helmed by Shonda Rhimes, the reigning queen of steamy romance television. It would not be inaccurate to describe it as Jane Austen porn.
The “gay best friend”, an age-old trope, has been done in countless films and television series. Ranging from one-note (Sex and the City's Stanford and Mario) to nuanced (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt's Tituss), the gay best friend exists to support and advise the main protagonist, with their conflicts swept to the side.
In the film adaptation, director Jon M. Chu turns each musical number into a massive show stopper, with grand set pieces and a wealth of diverse dancers. Yet, in this attempt to show reverence for the people of the Washington Heights barrio, Chu, or maybe more specifically those in charge of casting, left out a crucial part of the community, Afro-Latinos.
Ultimately the problem with The Bubble is that it plays everything for laughs to get around the audience’s defenses. But it comes off like a privileged white male thinking that ridiculing everyone else equally is the road to equality. And it’s not. And it's definitely not funny to pretend that it is.