The Emasculator (2024)

Why did Māhū, a term once respected in Hawaiian culture, become so controversial?

Although Christmas is a time of year for love and cheer for all, holiday cinema has not always represented diverse communities. Being a holiday with Christian origins, much of its media consists of straight white families or straight white romances. Luckily, modern years have been bringing with them plenty of POC and LGBTQ+ representation that the holidays so desperately need.

Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame is a unique film coming from the same studio that brought us The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. While it does have its silly moments to maintain Disney’s family-friendliness, it also carries themes that stick to audiences years after its release.

These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.

I highly recommend Kill Bill: Volume 2. In classic Tarantino fashion, specific sections of the film are a tad too long, but overall, it’s a wonderful piece of escapist fiction.

The [SPOILER-Free] story of Jurassic World: Dominion is that the humans never learned from their mistakes from the previous films, science is still running amok, and the world is paying the price.