The People Could Fly (2024)

Here are some of our picks for inclusive Black love stories in film and media. We hope you enjoy these tender love stories and beautiful depictions.

A gentle coming of age story, Water Lilies takes its time in exploring what it’s like to be a young girl trying to make sense of her sexuality in a heteronormative world.

Outer Banks (2020-) knows its audience: young adults in a country that can’t stop romanticizing good ole’ treasure hunts. Add a little of Riverdale’s (2017-) sex appeal, and no one can look away. Forty years after The Goonies (1985) America’s consciousness hasn’t strayed from the same tropes: treasure hunts, a vulnerable white male lead, and the whitewashing of a racially segregated setting.

I understood post-memory as passing down stories and images of one’s experiences that are not your own. For decades, rape has been depicted in cinema through a third-person perspective, leaving the viewer to observe rape; not to experience it. 

Netflix’s recent Millie Bobby Brown vehicle, Enola Holmes 3, is a disappointing and confusing entry in the stellar Enola Holmes franchise. Directed by Philip Barantini, the film stars Brown as Enola Holmes, estranged sister of Sherlock Holmes, Henry Cavill as Sherlock Holmes, and Louis Partridge as her love interest, Viscount Tewkesbury. While it deserves credit for its exciting action scenes and attempts to expand the diversity of its Dickensian setting, the most recent entry in the series completely scuttles Enola’s underdog status from the first films that made her so charming and gave a touch of realism to the story of a young, unmarried woman living in London while self-employed as a detective.