Sleeping Beauty (2011)

A short film that begins with the language of romance but slowly reveals something far more unsettling beneath the surface.

The cancelling of these series is being blamed on the writers' strike and low viewership, but it's just the latest example of the industry's lack of appreciation for stories about queer women.

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. 

Here's what Disney got wrong with "Aladdin" and how it can avoid those pitfalls with "Hercules."

Perhaps the most amazing and groundbreaking quality about The Birdcage is how removed it is from both illness and insensitivity. Whereas films preceding it were often somber stories about the tribulations of being gay in a conservatively straight world, Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May expose the fallacies of conservatism as traditional values are thrown into a more open-minded space. They don’t care how far the community has fallen so much as how high they can rebuild themselves.

Cord Jefferson's hilarious and thought-provoking film continues a long-standing cinematic tradition, expanding the conversation around the impact of systemic racism in today's media.