Madman (1978)

Director Dana Ziyasheva made her directorial debut, 'Defenders of Life' which focuses on the Ngäbe community, and the hardships Ngäbe girls faced in Costa Rica.

Barry Jenkins' masterpiece holds up as the story of a lifetime centered on the intersection of Blackness and gay identity.

One young woman with an unusual background tries to find and establish herself in the real world, which isn't exactly as festive as she hoped it would be.

These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.

We, the Jane Austen aficionados, are suckers for everything and anything under the sun that’s remotely related to her and her world. That’s because we are so drawn to her unique style of fiction, romance, and social commentary, we take any allusion to her influence as a hint to what to expect when we start watching a movie or reading a book.

"La Noria" deftly subverts audience expectations as it explores childhood grief, anxieties, and pain. The award-winning short shows us that often our monsters are often sprung from our darkest places.