The Very Best of the Muppet Show (1999)

A quiet film that does not demand your tears but earns them. It explores love that lingers, timing that fails, and the silence between what was and what could have been.

A complex, realistic, and loving mother-daughter relationship is at the heart of this story about Black pageants and the fight for a better future.

Set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow era, the film offers layered representation.

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.

Initially feeling like a passionate group having a bit of harmless fun with filmmaking, it leads to something sinister enough to leave a mark.