'Zola' is a Modern Black Fairytale
It’s fun, it’s energetic, but it’s also understated and vicarial. Zola is a modern black fairytale and future of black movies.

It’s fun, it’s energetic, but it’s also understated and vicarial. Zola is a modern black fairytale and future of black movies.
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.
If you’re also a major fan of the familiar strangers story between two people of different generations, here are 5 underrated films you probably haven’t heard of, but might thoroughly enjoy.
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes: Organic Intelligence is not merely the fourth sequel in a cult classic film about a delicious vegetable apocalypse: it’s a love letter to slapstick, sight gags, and the original 1978 film. It’s also a meta-comedy, spy-thriller parody taking place in a world where the original film series was a documentary about the horrors of the Tomato War that the government covered up by convincing everyone it was a comedy. Taking place in 2026, Organic Intelligence sees genetically modified tomatoes grown out of control and rising up to attack humanity again - luckily, Agent Maria Sifuentes (Myrna Velasco) of the Federal Vegetable Investigation Bureau is there to uncover the corporate conspiracy behind it, and she won’t take no for an answer.
'Living' dives into many themes that we can all understand regardless of our cultural backgrounds. We can see this through the shared similarities between 'Ikiru' and 'Living'.
This current year, as well as the past several, has seen a slowly building increase in something the horror genre has required for quite a while in this critic's opinion...originality. I've stated before that I am very hard to please when it comes to this vein of the film industry's offerings, always leaning more towards that which sends chills through my very being in lieu of buckets of blood and gore.