River Trail Odyssey (2025)

Anna May Wong was a talented actress and a fashion icon and still had to fight for everything she had due to hatred and racism.

With The Father, writer-director Florian Zeller- who wrote and developed the play upon which the film is based- pulls no punches as he confidently makes every effort to put the audience in the mind of someone whose grip on reality has all but vanished. It’s a dazzling testament to Zeller’s abilities as a director as he makes his first transition from stage to film appear as if he’s been working behind a camera his entire career. The dialogue he fashions with co-writer Christopher Hampton, along with the work of production designers Peter Francis and Cathy Featherstone, collectively makes the downward spiral of dementia startlingly tangible, doing so in a way that can be comprehended by everyone except the person it directly affects.

Disguised as a cosmic highway horror, Alexander Ullom’s It Ends is a beautiful, albeit terrifying, metaphor for learning that if you want to survive adulthood and become your own person, you have to learn to let people go.

Ultimately the problem with The Bubble is that it plays everything for laughs to get around the audience’s defenses. But it comes off like a privileged white male thinking that ridiculing everyone else equally is the road to equality. And it’s not. And it's definitely not funny to pretend that it is.

"King Richard" paints a nuanced portrait of a Black father trying to ensure his daughters’ success in a racist, misogynistic world. Yet, Richard and his kids overcome that fear and adversity to succeed.

It’s fun, it’s energetic, but it’s also understated and vicarial. Zola is a modern black fairytale and future of black movies.