The Secret Agent Remembers the Absent Memory
The film reminds us to remember the people who had the courage and dignity that had made the world better, even when the memory was absent.

Mary Jane tries to light the oven. When she's unsuccessful, she plays around, getting black boot polish on her face. She mugs before a mirror. Then, it's back to work. When the stove still won't light, she pours in paraffin, winks at the camera, and lights a match. Kaboom! Is there any rest for the foolish, even in the grave?
The film reminds us to remember the people who had the courage and dignity that had made the world better, even when the memory was absent.
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.
When the world lost Chadwick Boseman on August 28, 2020, we all saw the impact of representation in film. Boseman was not only a Black superhero leading a Black cast in one of the most successful films in history; but his successes paved the way for more, long-overdue diversity in Hollywood.
Trigger Warning with Killer Mike, a part of Netflix's Black Lives Matter Collection, features different social experiments showcasing the larger state of race relations in our society.
True crime media is notoriously obsessed with the “missing white woman” trope, and yet the vast majority of American murder victims are male, and well over half are people of color.
The trouble with Yara (2021) is that in its attempt to tell the whole story, it struggles to tell a consistently engaging story.