The Big Surprise (1980)

'The Mad Woman and the Feminist': This Spanish entry for the MiamisFF directed by Sandra Gallego handles a difficult conversation in a smart, memorable way.

"Be good. It doesn’t mean you can’t be tough. It doesn’t mean you always have to be nice. Just be good."

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. 

White audiences saw Peola’s mixed-race passing as a Black woman’s struggle to be white. Black audiences saw it as the rebellion of a Black woman trying to gain privileges only given to white people.

After the untimely death of his brother by way of an ambush in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the protagonist, ‘81’(Alan Ritchson) unsuccessfully makes several attempts to become an Army Ranger. On his last mission to complete the Ranger selection process he and his squad encounter an otherworldly ‘soldier’.

The human experience is described through the eyes of a marginalized outsider, neither judgmental nor invested, just an observant donkey.