Stanley Beloved (1998)

What starts off as a success story for a single mother living below the poverty line, slowly begins to weave itself into a tangled web of greed, guilt, and destruction.

A dark film in the tradition The Brother’s Grimm.

The Djinn is about childhood traumas and lifestyle changes. It tells the story of Dylan (Ezra Dewey), a mute boy who blames himself for his mom’s death. He also condemns himself for being speech-impaired, and he thinks that if he did not have that condition, everything could had been different.

I was able to sit down and talk with singer/songwriter Carson Lueders about his career in the music industry. We talked influences from country music to Pop, and his working relationship with Quavo from the The Migos. 

With raw and unapologetic performances by Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman, stories about the hardships of Black musicians are weaved in with The Blues.

Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is a fan-favorite, as are some of the more science fiction angled movies like 28 Days Later or World War Z. I recently watched the 1995 Wolfgang Peterson-directed movie, Outbreak for the first time, which is currently available on Netflix.