The Cleaner (2021)

Shakti’ is a survival guide for women all over the world.

This 2024 musical film is based on the Broadway show and the 2004 film of the same name with major differences.

To say Hollywood has had a troubled past is the understatement of the century. In Ryan Murphy’s (American Horror Story) new Netflix series, Hollywood, that past is confronted and even rewritten.

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.

Documented human suffering is never easy to view or read about and is understandably triggering for many people, but it can be educational, and education is a key to change. An overwhelming amount queer people worldwide (and in my own country) have it far worse than I could imagine, and documentaries such as Welcome to Chechnya bring issues to light that certain groups of people would never see.

The Brazilian filmmaker Alexandre Alonso’s Hunter is a film with a lot of ideas, but with very little holding those ideas together.