Here Comes a 'Spirited' Christmas
Spirited inverts the tropes of the holiday musical genre to update an age-old tale for 2022. It's a paean to those who make grand spectacles possible.

An unofficial sequel to the movie "Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession". The events take place on New Year's Eve 1997-1998, 24 years after the events of the movie. According to the plot, the main characters (Shurik, Bunsha, Zina and Ulyana Andreyevna) are going to celebrate New Year's Eve, and the engineer Alexander Sergeyevich Timofeev (Shurik) decides to present his recreated (and modernized) time machine to the guests. Having gone to the XVI century, they find there an aged Georges Miloslavsky, who has been sitting as regent for 25 years instead of Ivan the Terrible, who has run away; the Tsar was so inspired by the profession of Zina and Yakin that he decided to try his hand at filmmaking and went to "Mosfilm" instead of the Tsar's chambers. In an effort to correct the disruption of the course of history, the heroes re-engage the time machine and travel back to the 1970s in search of the Tsar, who dreams of becoming an actor.
Spirited inverts the tropes of the holiday musical genre to update an age-old tale for 2022. It's a paean to those who make grand spectacles possible.
'Reservation Dogs' is stacked with an array of Native American performers and crew telling their own story.
Kat Wahlen’s The Whiteboard tells, or rather shows, a delightful love story between two young women who meet in detention.
Him is visually stunning—all concrete cathedrals and bone-rattling impact shots that look like a nightmare highlight reel. Marlon Wayans is magnetic as this legendary quarterback who's basically selling salvation with a smile that never quite reaches his eyes. But the story keeps running in circles: more tests, more cryptic pep talks, more ritualistic drills. The sports-as-religion metaphor beats you over the head when subtlety would've been more effective. The middle drags, and that finale chooses spectacle over substance. It's undeniably stylish, but left me cold. Also worth noting: despite the Monkeypaw connection, this isn't actually a Jordan Peele film—he didn't write or direct.
The Sandman features a plethora of LGBTQ+ characters and is openly expressive about it!
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.