'The Resort': Five Perfect Minutes and Countless Missed Opportunities
The Resort has an excellent climax surrounded by disappointments. Somehow, at a mere 75 minutes, this movie still manages to be 70 minutes too long.

A young teenager returns home after an absence to find his village in Iran deserted because of an incredibly severe drought. He begins a search to find his family, traveling through an amazingly bleak and desolate landscape. Primarily an essay on the issue of humans vs. nature, the film is of interest for technical and cultural reasons.
The Resort has an excellent climax surrounded by disappointments. Somehow, at a mere 75 minutes, this movie still manages to be 70 minutes too long.
The Gates, John Burr’s new thriller film, is a disturbingly realistic portrayal of three Black twenty-somethings - Derek (Mason Gooding), Kevin (Algee Smith), and Tyon (Keith Powers), as they accidentally take a wrong turn into a gated community that’s more like a modern-day sundown town. The three friends witness a variety of crimes in their new surroundings, including an attempted homicide and an attempted rape. As they attempt to alert the authorities and do the right thing, they are thwarted at every turn by the worst horror stories of American conservatism - racist white suburbanites, reckless gun violence, corrupt police, religious mania, and a megalomaniacal pastor.
“Ad Astra” is a film that possesses similar beats to sci-fi classics, falling into the realm of cinematic hypnotism, and pulling us in with its mysteriously intoxicating identity.
The trainwreck is hot but tame.
‘Candyman’ (2021) builds upon the original 1992 film by presenting the myth of Candyman not only as an example of black pain, but as an opportunity for black vengeance.
Black Christmas movies are few and far in between to find — so it is wonderful to see more representation on the screen just in time