Cassie lost her very best friend (and only true soulmate) to suicide. Why? A violent and repeated rape seriously traumatized Nina and she couldn’t go on. And, no one listened.

The horror of Bobby Seale’s gagging by Judge Julius Hoffman in Aaron Sorkin’s timely film The Trial of the Chicago 7 is an image of what Black Lives Matter is fighting against. It’s an image of how being silenced provokes rage.

When attachments go wrong in early life, you have to toughen up. But is feeling nothing “The Way?” If you thought it was, what does it take to break free and allow love?

Feeling trapped in the quarantine of COVID-19? That’s why you should watch Shawshank Redemption more today than ever. Yes, I mean today, January 20, 2021, the day of the Inauguration, and all the days ahead.

The Queen’s Gambit is a tale of chess and childhood tragedy. This riveting series shows us clearly that when traumatized children try to survive adulthood, they may have questionable ways of coping. But there’s a big difference between the ways children “get by” and the ways that actually help them heal.

Are you having trouble making love work? Can’t seem to go with the flow in your relationships? Well, Chuck Lorre’s two-season Netflix series The Kominsky Method offers some lessons in love that just might help.

Richard Curtis’ 2003 film classic, Love Actually, is the ultimate Christmas rom-com. After all, the Christmas holiday season is the season of love, romance, and family. But what if you couldn’t be with family because of the pandemic?

Jordan Peele’s brilliantly conceived film Get Out does its job of shattering the myth that we’re living in a post-racial America. My great uncle, Leo Hurwitz’s film Strange Victory, did the same in 1948 after we won the war against Hitler but came home to racism here. It’s now 72 years later, and there’s still too much to be scared of.

Watching Autumn’s cautious troubled face in the quietness of Never Rarely Sometimes Always draws us into the dark shattered life of a traumatized girl. If she’d let us in. Autumn lives behind walls. Alone. Vigilant. Angry. Always afraid. Can’t allow help: “I’ve got it.” People aren’t to be trusted. That she’s learned. If you think Eliza Hittman’s captivating film is only about teenage pregnancy and abortion, that’s not the whole story. By far. Never Rarely Sometimes Always reveals a world of secrets and terror. Of sexual abuse. A lonely world with no one to reach inside the pain. Or is there?

We see the trauma. And, we witness the friendship and love. I’m talking about Sam Mendes’s more-than-war film, 1917. I’m also talking about a different kind of war that all of us are fighting now. A war with an invisible virus. COVID-19.

Has it really been 4 years since John Crowley and Nick Hornby’s film, Brooklyn, hit the big screen? And, why is it still a movie that speaks to us and that we keep going back to? Is it because it’s the versatile and talented Saorise Ronan’s first major film? Or because we all know, somewhere deep inside us, our own journey away from our original homes? What is the appeal? I think it’s because Brooklyn tells us so much about what can go wrong between a mother and a daughter, about a young girl’s early pain, pain that persists.

Hunger can lead to desperate acts. And, it does –  in Bong Joon-Ho’s startling new film, Parasite. Plus, we find. if you’re hungry and helpless (emotionally, that is), you can even become a parasite. The kind of hunger we witness in many of Parasite’s characters leads to various forms of exploitation – of the class above or below. But, it’s not simply exploitation that makes for a parasite.

Desire is what director, Luca Guadagnino, hoped to convey in Call Me By Your Name – the kind of desire that allows you to live life by following your feelings with openness. Guadagnino calls this: “living with a sense of joie de vivre”, in which, he says: “we should always be very earnest with [our] feelings, instead of hiding them or shielding ourselves.”

Poor Phil Connors. He’s stuck repeating the same day over and over again. It’s been 25 years since Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day hit the theaters for the first time. Hopefully, none of you have spent that long living the same day.

Paul Thomas Anderson has done it again. He’s a master at exploring the various kinds of perverse power games involved in problems with dependency and love. Anderson’s new film, Phantom Thread, is another brilliant character study to add to Boogie Nights, Magnolia, The Master, and Inherent Vice (to name a notable few).

The Big Sick, Emily V. Gordon, and Kumail Nanjiani’s touching, sad, scary, and deeply heart-warming romantic comedy tells us a lot about those old rules you live by. They’re not so easy to break. They turn into “should-s,” carry terrible guilt; they make you scared. And, along with all that, they confuse you…