Pain Pain Flies Away Jutsu! (2026)

A Black woman centered in a box office rom-com with a happy ending and no struggle love.

A film for the post-MeToo era that inverts the narrative with an ironic coda, Tár depicts the duality of a sensitive artist capable of great evil and vile manipulation.

The newest in a long line of Cinderella adaptations, Amazon’s Cinderella (2021) prizes girlbossification above the very story it tries to adapt.

An apocalyptic tale captivates the nation as it teaches us to love even in the hardest situations.

I write for a diversity-focused film review blog, so I’ll be honest: I really wanted to like Pretty Lethal. Starring Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, Avantika, and Millicent Simmonds, Amazon Prime’s new thriller seemed like it would be a girl power movie about dancers with a horror action twist. Sort of a Suspiria for teens. But with shallow and unlikeable characters, a confusing plot, an overreliance on violence, and cringey dialogue, any fun the movie started out with was quickly lost. What was left was a faint echo of greater horror movies about dancers made before. 

“And I think to myself….what a wonderful world”. Louis Armstrong sang about this notion via his classic 1967 song, an ode to witnessing elements of our life that should be but some reminders of exactly what that concluding line of each verse indicates. Now we see our contemporary realities and, just being honest, it makes a sentiment like this seem SO overtly far away….perhaps even impossible….to accept or believe could be. It sounds harsh, but again, so much of what is occurring speaks not to beauty, but bedlam.