Private Entrance (2025)

"13 Going on 30" tracks the tricky transition from adolescence to adulthood.

This little Netflix film was very inspirational. It passes the Bechdel test, and features a different worldview with rural Indian representation.

Indie director, Niki Caro (known for 'Whale Rider') directs the live-action 'Mulan' and sets another example of strong females fighting against gender inequality.

Despite the film’s efforts to reframe its heroine with modern complexity, a certain emotional distance lingers.

It only seems to prove that when the company had their backs against the wall and needed an all pleasing, generic movie that had to make up for The Last Jedi, they chose to sacrifice almost everything that made their main protagonist interesting and that made her stand out as the strong female character that a generation of young movie goers was supposed to look up to. Instead, we were left with a Rey that was so much less than she could have been. And I guess that’s the real story of Rey and The Rise of Skywalker; they could have been so much more, but they were just more of the same.

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.