Now, Hear Me Good (2025)

A young woman finds herself trapped in a crossfire of awkwardness during a nightmarish dinner party with her boyfriend's dysfunctional family.

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.

American Fiction is a genuinely entertaining film with a few lessons.

When a group of White women are invited to dinner by an Indian woman and a Black woman to talk about race in America, sparks fly.

Yeah, sure, the movie’s about Carnage. But it’s really about love. A love that defies all odds: the love between a man and his man-eating alien symbiote.

You can’t talk to my grandpa about The Sopranos. You can’t talk to him about The Godfather either. Merely by bringing up the subject, you’d be treated to a lecture on how movies and TV want you to believe that all Italians are criminals and mobsters. He won’t watch any of it, in protest.