Laila's Sweet Dream 

Love Hard is a Christmas romcom about two people who fall in love while pretending to date. It’s a romantic and fun watch. If you can forget the catfishing.

Despite its aggressiveness, the Beef anthology series is about romantic love in all its forms. The final scene of the first season led us to believe that, despite the conflict, drama, and toxic traits, the main characters would end up together and, most likely, live happily ever after. The whole “beef” plot was the prelude to their love story.

Bong Joon Ho’s masterpiece, Parasite (2019) became one of the few international films to break into the American mainstream.

Stand and Deliver is an inspirational classic from 1988 starring Edward James Olmos as Jaime Escalante, and his class of rag tag students in East Los Angeles. It’s the story of how a new teacher shows a motley group of students in the inner city with backgrounds as gang members, dishwashers, and mechanics — the power of self-determination. He teaches the teenagers to believe in themselves through algebra and calculus.

We have a long way to go with LGBT representation in film, especially when it comes to LGBT characters of color and trans characters.