Madonna: The Video Collection 93:99 (1999)

Adam Sandler goes hard as an NBA scout in this male-heavy sports-drama.

I highly recommend Kill Bill: Volume 2. In classic Tarantino fashion, specific sections of the film are a tad too long, but overall, it’s a wonderful piece of escapist fiction.

Although bogged down by a slow pace and moralistic intent, ‘Deadly Garage Sale’ (2022) makes the most of its silly and nonsensical premise.

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. 

What makes the lighting in Casablanca even more impressive is how it reflects the emotional states of the characters without needing explicit dialogue.

Netflix’s Shadow and Bone has a complicated relationship with race. It has a diverse cast, but not without its problems. Based on Leigh Bardugo’s two book series, the show features characters from the Shadow and Bone trilogy, which is very straight and white, and the Six of Crows duology, which is much more diverse. When bringing together a cast and writing about these characters, the team behind the show expanded upon some of the representation missing from the first trilogy, then seemed to take away representation from the duology. Shadow and Bone seems to play a bit of a push and pull game when it comes to portraying diversity onscreen.