The Dragon House 

Tired of being cooped up in their cages, the critters escape the Australian zoo and try to find their way to the outback.

The Gates, John Burr’s new thriller film, is a disturbingly realistic portrayal of three Black twenty-somethings - Derek (Mason Gooding), Kevin (Algee Smith), and Tyon (Keith Powers), as they accidentally take a wrong turn into a gated community that’s more like a modern-day sundown town. The three friends witness a variety of crimes in their new surroundings, including an attempted homicide and an attempted rape. As they attempt to alert the authorities and do the right thing, they are thwarted at every turn by the worst horror stories of American conservatism - racist white suburbanites, reckless gun violence, corrupt police, religious mania, and a megalomaniacal pastor. 

For anyone who is not a cis white woman, a justice-fueled murderous rampage is not framed as liberation. Instead, they contribute to harsh stereotypes that vilify minority women with dangerous consequences.

Overall, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is plagued by numerous flaws, both from a quality and from a diversity standpoint.  The film relies on gore and loud sounds to drown out its flat script, flatter dialogue, and one-dimensional characters. 

This film is based off of The Diary of a Young Girl, which was written during the Holocaust period.

It only seems to prove that when the company had their backs against the wall and needed an all pleasing, generic movie that had to make up for The Last Jedi, they chose to sacrifice almost everything that made their main protagonist interesting and that made her stand out as the strong female character that a generation of young movie goers was supposed to look up to. Instead, we were left with a Rey that was so much less than she could have been. And I guess that’s the real story of Rey and The Rise of Skywalker; they could have been so much more, but they were just more of the same.