'Pain Hustlers' (2023): An Opioid Crisis
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.

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.
Netflix’s Shadow and Bone has a complicated relationship with race. It has a diverse cast, but not without its problems. Based on Leigh Bardugo’s two book series, the show features characters from the Shadow and Bone trilogy, which is very straight and white, and the Six of Crows duology, which is much more diverse. When bringing together a cast and writing about these characters, the team behind the show expanded upon some of the representation missing from the first trilogy, then seemed to take away representation from the duology. Shadow and Bone seems to play a bit of a push and pull game when it comes to portraying diversity onscreen.
'Kajillionaire' is a touching and eccentric story about family, crime, and the search for belonging.
A family adventure film that features Hawaiian culture with a representative director and a diverse cast.
Given Hollywood's history of racism and financial motivations, how much progress can we expect? Plus: a list of excellent films by Black directors.
Thunder Force brings much-needed diversity to the superhero genre. Unfortunately, it's also an uninteresting and unfunny mess.