The Year of the Pig 

The film's storylines read as allegories for the queer experience and that's a source of solace for LGBTQIA+ fans!

Over the last several years, I have had the privilege of being one of the critics having the opportunity to watch and review several films from writer/director/producer Marcellus Cox, whose efforts are never anything less but grounded, relevant, and steeped in unflinching glimpses illustrating the gripping, inspired, and ever-vacillating realms that make up the human condition.

Disney has a glaring and, up until recently, unaddressed issue that spans nearly its entire lifetime - an absence of diversity.

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.

Hope has great characters, inventive ideas, an incredible imagination, a palpable intensity, and numerous other aspects that make it one of the best of the year.