Orphan (2025)

Gay representation is out there, but to portray a character who's gay as a big, happy brute is a rare treat.

In ‘The Owl House’ protagonist Luz Noceda stumbles across a portal to another dimension where magic exists, called The Boiling Isles.

Kate Winslet and Saorise Ronan deliver stellar performances in a film that doesn't live up to its potential.

Two Distant Strangers (2020) centers around Carter James (Joey Bada$$) as he tries to get back home to his pitbull, Jeter, after spending a night at the apartment of his date Perri (Zaria Simone). What gets in the way of Carter reuniting with his dog is that every time he tries to leave Perri’s apartment,  he is killed by police and wakes up back in her bed in a never-ending cycle. It addresses the issue of police brutality which rightly has been in the public eye more and more with the unjust deaths caused at the hands of law enforcement.

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.

I’m disappointed in The Woman in Cabin 10, but that’s at least in part because of my love of Ruth Ware’s novel.