Purple Hearts is an enemies-to-lovers romance about a liberal musician and a conservative marine. When Cassie, a singer-songwriter, finds out that her insurance doesn’t cover the insulin that she needs as a type 1 diabetic, she asks her marine best friend to marry her for the military spouse benefits. He can’t oblige because of his girlfriend, but his roommate, Luke overhears the conversation and realizes that marrying Cassie will afford him enough extra pay while serving to pay off his debts to his old drug dealer....

Director Jordan Peele’s new science fiction thriller, Nope, tells the story of two siblings, Emerald (Keke Palmer) and Otis “OJ” Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), continuing their father’s legacy of handling horses for television. Their family history has been intertwined with Hollywood and horses for generations.  The first motion picture ever made was an 11-frame clip of a Black man riding a horse. Emerald and OJ are his descendants. The Haywood story spirals out from there as Emerald and OJ work to maintain their family’s legacy while grappling...

Kate Beacom and Louis Legge's Rehab Cabin is Misery for the Lindsey Lohan generation. Best friends Chloe and Dominic are at odds when Dominic decides to return to college after deferring for a year to hang out with Chloe, the immature, manipulative, and often insufferable antihero of the story. As Dominic starts to pull away, Chloe is grasping at straws to keep him home with her.  When the pair are helping Chloe’s dad out by driving for his limo service,  their favorite former child star and...

There is no actor who portrays the cutting sadness and hope of being in love quite like Juliette Binoche, and it’s a talent she puts to great use in Claire Denis’ high-stakes romantic drama Both Sides of the Blade. Co-written with Christine Angot (who adapted her own novel for the screenplay), Both Sides reunites Binoche with Denis and Angot for the first time since 2017’s Let the Sunshine In, a more effervescent, if meandering, love story. Sara (Binoche) and Jean (Vincent Lindon, from last year’s Titane)...

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande Directed by Sophie Hyde Out June 17 Good Luck to You, Leo Grande leads with an intriguing premise: an Emma Thompson-led sex comedy. Thompson plays Nancy, a widowed, former religious-education teacher who has only had sex with her husband and never had an orgasm. That is, until she hires sex worker Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack). Before they can get around to getting down, however, Leo needs to find his way through Nancy’s emotional fortress. Not the raunch-fest suggested by the plot, the...

If you’re checking whether or not a piece of media is feminist, the Bechdel Test—coined by writer Alison Bechdel in her 1985 comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For—is a good place to start. It asks just three questions: are two women present in the work? If so, do those women have at least one conversation? And is that conversation about anything but a man? If the answer to all of those questions is yes, the test is passed! Though the Bechdel Test has become widely...

Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s Neptune Frost is a gorgeous, Afrofuturist musical that tells a story of love, loss, and anti-capitalism. With a script by Williams, an actor/poet/playwright whose work defies easy categorization, Neptune Frost is a cultural experience that is open for interpretation while still conveying a specific message about surpassing the boundaries. Uzeyman, a Rwandan actor/playwright/director and the film’s cinematographer, communicates beauty and pain through vibrant colors and beautiful Black skin lit to perfection, with a dizzying array of influences from Sun Ra...

Adventures in Success, a mockumentary-gone-right, depicts a small modern day sex cult in the Catskills that prioritizes the female orgasm, which they believe will heal Mother Earth. It's members spend a lot of their time “jilling off”— if you know what I mean. Classified as a “dark comedy,” the movie doesn’t feature a star-studded bunch, but each member of the small cast really makes the movie what it is. This film takes the concept of a “sex cult” down a peg, normalizing its members—as if...

Sammy Ko (Miya Cech) is at a major turning point in her life. The 13-year-old has been acting out since the death of her mother, and after a particularly impressive display of vandalism, her dad, Angus (Leonardo Nam), gives her an ultimatum: Sammy must complete a class at the local community college, or it’s off to Camp Sparrow Cliff for the rest of the summer. A third option presents itself to Sammy when she crosses paths with Margot (Rhea Perlman), a children’s magician who sees...

Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman is about a sweetly witchy house in the woods where a little girl in mourning for her grandmother happens upon a playmate with the same name as her bereaved mother. The bereaved mother, Marion, has just exited stage left, too upset by the death of her own mother to deal with the house and its archives — the childhood notebooks, the shadow panther that hunts and haunts her bedroom at night. Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) and her new friend, young Marion (Gabrielle Sanz,...