HIM/SELF 

The Magician's Elephant has a strong multicultural cast and a heartwarming story about bringing two long-lost siblings back together

I write for a diversity-focused film review blog, so I’ll be honest: I really wanted to like Pretty Lethal. Starring Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, Avantika, and Millicent Simmonds, Amazon Prime’s new thriller seemed like it would be a girl power movie about dancers with a horror action twist. Sort of a Suspiria for teens. But with shallow and unlikeable characters, a confusing plot, an overreliance on violence, and cringey dialogue, any fun the movie started out with was quickly lost. What was left was a faint echo of greater horror movies about dancers made before. 

Leveraging the cockiness of many of his interview subjects, Theroux created an exposing documentary that shows just how scary these sections of the internet can be.

The Gates, John Burr’s new thriller film, is a disturbingly realistic portrayal of three Black twenty-somethings - Derek (Mason Gooding), Kevin (Algee Smith), and Tyon (Keith Powers), as they accidentally take a wrong turn into a gated community that’s more like a modern-day sundown town. The three friends witness a variety of crimes in their new surroundings, including an attempted homicide and an attempted rape. As they attempt to alert the authorities and do the right thing, they are thwarted at every turn by the worst horror stories of American conservatism - racist white suburbanites, reckless gun violence, corrupt police, religious mania, and a megalomaniacal pastor. 

'Easy A' is emblematic of a world that liked to sarcastically pretend it was progressive but wasn’t actually ready for that change, making it pretty anti-sex.

While the director didn't set out to make a feminist film, "A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night" reads as a reclamation of female power in a patriarchal society.