Westward Bound (1944)

J Brooke, Incluvie Guest Columnist on 'Life and Beth' and 'Sort of': while living one’s truth is freedom, speaking it as a mandatory assignment can become captivity.

Tara Thorne’s film is equal parts emotional and comedic, illustrating the beauty and the pain of long term relationships.

Disney has kept its word and allowed a new generation of Black and/or African storytellers to tell their own original stories. The question remains, will the public keep their word?

For anyone who is not a cis white woman, a justice-fueled murderous rampage is not framed as liberation. Instead, they contribute to harsh stereotypes that vilify minority women with dangerous consequences.

Some people’s first introduction to Mira Nair might be as New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s mom. But with her insightful direction of 1991’s Mississippi Masala, Nair shows how much she deserves to be known as an artist. Delivering a nuanced portrait of a romance between a Black man and an Indian woman living in the South, Nair explores the complications each character faces, giving both equal weight.

It only seems to prove that when the company had their backs against the wall and needed an all pleasing, generic movie that had to make up for The Last Jedi, they chose to sacrifice almost everything that made their main protagonist interesting and that made her stand out as the strong female character that a generation of young movie goers was supposed to look up to. Instead, we were left with a Rey that was so much less than she could have been. And I guess that’s the real story of Rey and The Rise of Skywalker; they could have been so much more, but they were just more of the same.