Variola Vera 

I have talked with founder of Red Nation Television Network, Joanelle Romero, and the future of Indigenous representation looks bright.

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.

There is no such thing as watching too many movies. Since we're still quarantined, I wanted to recommend another 19 movies for people to check out across Netflix, HBO Max, and more.

Ditch the lube and get to the point in the raw, honest, cheeky dramedy written and directed by Mark Schwab.

Perhaps the most amazing and groundbreaking quality about The Birdcage is how removed it is from both illness and insensitivity. Whereas films preceding it were often somber stories about the tribulations of being gay in a conservatively straight world, Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May expose the fallacies of conservatism as traditional values are thrown into a more open-minded space. They don’t care how far the community has fallen so much as how high they can rebuild themselves.

This is ambitious horror filmmaking, and in a lot of ways, I fully admire its ambitions. For me, the film’s sloppiness defines its overall quality.