Torrid Zone (1940)

A haunting look at grief, survival, and a mother’s quiet collapse in a world that never gave her room to fall.

How powerful can a story be when it is stripped to the bare essentials of just a room, a handful of people and raw human voice?

The more we learned with each passing minute the bigger the reveal. This film ends with a serious bang and it was truly a joy to watch.

This Nickelodeon live-action TV series features strong Black representation.

I think these messages and the way they are presented in this small-town in Texas are increasingly more important as the internet/ social media becomes more and more critical and judgemental every day. Love yourself today and every day because as Ru Paul always says: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love someone else?”

Stand and Deliver is an inspirational classic from 1988 starring Edward James Olmos as Jaime Escalante, and his class of rag tag students in East Los Angeles. It’s the story of how a new teacher shows a motley group of students in the inner city with backgrounds as gang members, dishwashers, and mechanics — the power of self-determination. He teaches the teenagers to believe in themselves through algebra and calculus.