It’s an odd time to do a send-up of romantic comedies. The genre is out of fashion—in fact, I’m racking my brain to think of the last traditional rom-com to appear in movie theaters. (Crazy Rich Asians comes close, although it’s really more of a rollicking ensemble piece; the wonderful The Big Sick is definitely a rom-com, but hardly a traditional one.) For the most part, the rom-com genre has landed on TV (think Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and Set It Up or even the delightful TV Land sitcom Younger.)

It’s no wonder then, that when Isn’t It Romantic wants to cite the rom-coms that our jaded, unlucky-in-love heroine (Rebel Wilson) has had it up to here with, they have to dip into the wayback machine: Pretty Woman, Sweet Home Alabama, Notting Hill, The Wedding Singer.

In the office where Wilson’s Natalie works as a junior architect, she rattles off all the things she hates about rom-coms: The cliched gay bestie; the makeover montages; the way it pits women against each other in the workplace; the way the heroine’s clumsiness is considered endearing instead of annoying; the slow-motion runs at the end to catch a plane or break up a wedding.

Then she gets mugged in the subway, knocks her head on a pole, and wakes up in a rom-com herself. New York is suddenly shiny and clean and smells of lavender. Her apartment is twice its size and filled with great furniture and designer shoes. She has that gay bestie (Brandon Scott Jones), who is only around to give “you go, girl!” affirmations and, for the most part, has no inner life of his own. There are spontaneous dance numbers.

At work, her old assistant and best friend Whitney (Betty Gilpin) is suddenly a competitive power-bitch gunning for Natalie’s job. Her doting guy pal Josh (Adam Devine) is still sweet on her, but now he’s dating a supermodel and “yoga ambassador” (“That’s not a thing,” mutters Natalie), played by Priyanka Chopra. And a hunky billionaire hotel owner, Blake (Liam Hemsworth), thinks Natalie is “beguiling.”

The whole film goes down smoothly, thanks to a cute (if rarely laugh-out-loud) script and a winning performance by Rebel Wilson, who effortlessly displays her movie star chops. Wilson has always been funny when she’s done gross-out humor, exaggerated come hithers, and pratfalls, but she’s relatively dialed down here—and still, well, beguiling. Hemsworth is great as the smooth-talking cad, proving that both the Hemsworth boys have comedic chops to go along with their preternatural good looks (damn them!). And truth be told, this is the first time I’ve actually liked Adam Devine, probably because he’s playing a sweetheart instead of his usual smarmy frat boy type.

So yeah, Isn’t It Romantic is unnecessary but it is diverting all the same and even has some wise things to say about regressive rom-com tropes. (Hint: The person who really completes you was staring back at you in the mirror all along.)

Cal Ripken Jr., Michael Phelps, and Ray Lewis are arguably Baltimore’s most recognizable sports figures. They all have appeared in hundreds of commercials between them, but Lewis is taking his acting career to the next level. The former Ravens linebacker will be making a cameo in an upcoming film shot and based in Baltimore.

Potential was created by Maryland-based writer and director Jason Slawson and funded by local production company SNM Global Holdings. According to IMDb, it’s a dramatic comedy about life choices and “adulting” in a fast-paced society.

“Potential follows the lives of four thirty-somethings trying to jump-start their respective futures,” as it reads on IMDb. “Broke and struggling, they fight to make ends meet and gain forward momentum in their lives, all the while dealing with dead-end jobs, faltering relationships, and the successes of their friends.”

During a Q&A between the producer Grant Slawson and CEO of SNM Global Troy Lowman, the two discussed Lewis’ role in the upcoming film. Lowman says that Lewis showed interest in the production company and thought giving him a cameo was a great idea.

“He’s not just a Baltimore icon—he’s a national icon,” Lowman said. “I think it would give the movie some exposure it wouldn’t otherwise get. He’s also a pretty funny guy. I won’t spoil it for everybody, but I think it will be one of the highlights of the movie.”

Although Lewis has never been in a movie—we aren’t counting his 2014 cameo in Draft Day—and the producers thought including him would bring a wider demographic in to see the film. The fact that the movie is set in Baltimore didn’t hurt either. Lewis was in the city last week for the film’s casting call at Jimmy’s Seafood in Dundalk—which will also make a cameo.

There’s no word yet on when the film will be released or the character Lewis is playing, but pre-production is set to begin in August. And the jury is still out on whether or not the legendary linebacker will perform his signature squirrel dance.

“I’m really excited about the movie, especially the comedy side of it,” Lewis said in a January interview. “There’s this thing about me always being so tough, but there’s another side of me that’s just pure laughter. This is my first time behind the camera, but I can also say it won’t be my last.”

In the year 1841, Solomon Northrop (Chewetel Ejiofor) is living in Saratoga, NY with his wife and two children. He is a violinist, an upstanding member of the community. He is not completely impervious to the nearby horrors of slavery—a curious slave sees Solomon shopping in a general store, wanders in, only to be excoriated by his master—but it’s something happening to other men, in other parts of the country, less educated men, not men like him.

One fateful day, he agrees to take a job as a traveling musician, but it’s all a ruse. He’s drugged and sold into slavery. Solomon’s hell is not just that he’s been enslaved, but that his erudition, his very status as a free man, must be kept secret from his masters, who will sooner beat him to death than allow him to put on supposed airs. Against all instinct, he must learn to somehow bide his time, blend in, while secretly searching for a way to reclaim his freedom.

Yes, the film is based on a true story.

When I was a young girl I saw the wide-reaching and educational mini series Roots and it had a profound effect on me, as it did for many of my generation. But in a way, by focusing on the plight of a single man, 12 Years a Slave packs even more of a visceral wallop.

Director Steve McQueen gets in close—at times impossibly, unflinchingly close—so that we feel every threat, every humiliation along with Solomon. And Ejiofor is just remarkable as a man whose survival instinct is strong enough to see that he must suppress his pride and his anger and simply . . . wait.

In the film, Solomon has two masters. The first, named Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), is the “good” master—at least he doesn’t treat his slaves with cruelty. There’s compassion, although it’s the kind of compassion one might have for a beloved pet, not a fellow human being.

When he arrives at Ford’s plantation, Solomon watches, with horror, as a mother (Kelsey Scott) is separated from her two small children. She is wailing, inconsolable. Ford’s wife (Liza J. Bennet) observes her with mild pity, then says something along the lines of: “Poor thing. But she’ll forget about her children soon.”

The idea that this grief sick woman would ever “forget” her children is absurd—but one of the film’s key observations about human nature. This is how people could justify their own inhumanity—by seeing the slaves as less than human, somehow less capable of things like maternal love.

One of Ford’s plantation hands (Paul Dano), is threatened by Solomon’s obvious intelligence and the favor he has managed to curry with Ford. It all spills out in a vicious assault that leaves Solomon with no choice but to defend himself. As punishment, he is strung up to be lynched, but given a last minute reprieve. So instead of being hung, he’s left dangling, too high to plant his feet, two tip-toes dancing on the ground his only means to stay alive, for hour after hour, as life on the plantation continues around him apace. It is truly one of the most chilling images I’ve ever seen on film.

After that, staying on Ford’s plantation is no longer tenable, so Solomon is sold to another slave owner, Epps (Michael Fassbender)—and, inconceivably, his life is about to get even worse. Because Epps is not just your garden variety slave owner, he’s a full on sociopath, with a quick temper, a fragile ego, and an obsessive and dangerous lust for his prize slave Patsey (an astonishing Lupita Nyong’o). Epps’ wife (excellent Sarah Paulson) is aware of this dangerous obsession and, instead of seeing this poor girl as a victim of her husband’s rape, perceives her as a harpy and a threat.

We also meet the cynical Mistress Shaw (Alfre Woodard), the mistress of a plantation owner, who has managed a comfortable life as a kept woman, as all around her, fellows slaves suffer ongoing trials. The film doesn’t judge Mistress Shaw, but merely sees her as another adaptor and survivor.

My admiration for this truly great film (and current Oscar frontrunner) is slightly mired by two things. For one, I’m not sure if we needed to feel every lash of the whip on Solomon or Patsey’s back, or if we needed to see the horror of every objectification and assault etched on their faces. (As I said, McQueen never met a close-up he didn’t love.) Sometimes, suggestion is even more powerful than representation.

Also, I was more interested in the compromised immorality of Cumberbatch’s Ford than the full on sociopathy of Fassbender’s Epps (the banality of evil is always more intriguing to me). We spend more time with Epps than Ford—I would’ve personally preferred the opposite.

But what the film may lack in restraint it more than makes up for in stirring performances, haunting imagery, and an unforgettable story of perseverance, human dignity, and survival.

12 Years a Slave is best film about the tragedy of American slavery I’ve ever seen. Or to put it another way: It’s the worst film about the tragedy of American slavery I’ve ever seen.

He’s 49 years old, but in some ways, Quentin Tarantino is still that genius kid in the video store. We can still see him rubbing his hands gleefully as he makes his films, drunk on film’s possibility. He makes up his own rules, smashing through genres, audaciously blurring time periods, laughing in the face of cinematic convention. He’s the filmmaker reimagined as part Mozart, part Willy Wonka, and part Sid Vicious. The end product is almost always obscenely entertaining.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that Tarantino is all raging id. There’s rigor and even scholarship in his work. Indeed, it takes a lot of discipline to be so brilliantly anarchistic.

Tarantino makes me laugh at and revel in things I generally don’t like—extreme violence, for one; offensive language for another—which is one of his great gifts. Like all talented filmmakers, he’s a con-man, a grifter. He gets away with things because he’s that good. (Kids, do not try this at home.)

But I do think that, for all his mad scientist tricks, Tarantino’s greatest (and perhaps most underappreciated) gift is writing dialogue. Each character gets his or her on own patois, his own idiom, and delights in his own language—whether it be cracked slang or floridly pretentious wordplay. And when Tarantino wants to write someone genuinely witty and eloquent—as is the case with Django Unchained’s droll bounty hunter King Schultz (Christoph Waltz)—it’s a marvelous thing to behold.

Tarantino’s last film was the enormously satisfying Inglourious Basterds, a warped revenge pic about a gang of Jewish toughs killing Hitler. As a Jewish woman, I can say I had zero problem with Tarantino taking on my people’s collective tragedy. The genius was, it was the Jews who did the clobberin’. I cheered wildly.

Tarantino seems to be on his “if only history was super cool” kick right now. Because with Django Unchained, he’s getting his revenge on white slave owners in the south. In many ways, this is a companion piece to Inglorious Basterds—we’re still squarely in revenge flick mode, but instead of WWII spy clichés, Tarantino now mixes up a gumbo of spaghetti Westerns, blaxploitation, and even sweeping romance films. He wields the same trick as in Basterds: Tarantino may not be black, but he allows the film’s hero—Jamie Foxx’s freed slave Django—to do the majority of the butt-whipping. It doesn’t feel exploitative. It feels cathartic.

The plot, in short: Schultz rescues Django because he can identify three names on his bounty list. Schultz is morally repulsed by slavery, and takes an immediate liking to Django. When he sees that Django is also an excellent shot (“Fastest gun in the South,” Schultz dubs him), he makes him a deal: If Django helps Schultz kill the rest of the names on his bounty list, he’ll help Django penetrate the Mississippi Candyland Plantation where his beloved wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) is enslaved.

The first half of the film is a spirited buddy pic of sorts, as Schultz and Django travel the countryside, killing bad guys in all sorts of rococo ways, cheating death, and slowly bonding. Both Waltz and Foxx are brilliant—Foxx gives Django a steely dignity, a righteous reservoir of anger, and the tiniest bit of irony behind his watchful eyes. And Waltz should put up a shrine to Tarantino in his home (if he doesn’t have one already). For the second film in a row, Tarantino has generously given him a scene stealing role and the actor clearly relishes the task—wearing Schultz’s intellectual superiority with the same gusto and flourish that he wears his enormous fur coat.

In the film’s second half, this unlikely duo arrives at Candyland, meets both the loathsome plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), and plots to rescue Broomhilda.

DiCaprio finds all sorts of disturbing grace notes—a tendency to infantilize himself, for one—in his role as the hedonistic, preening Candie, a man who thinks he’s refined but is, in fact, a boorish monster. But in a way, Jackson gives the bravest performance in the film. His Stephen is both dutifully loyal to his bratty boss and consumed with self-loathing (his jealousy over Django’s freedom manifests as suspicion and seething resentment). Jackson goes deep inside the conflicted mind of a so-called “Uncle Tom.” It’s riveting.

Alas, the film’s coda is overlong and unnecessarily bloody. For all his brilliance, I do wish that Tarantino was capable of showing some restraint. There’s a horrible scene of bare knuckled fighting to the death that I had to look away from (unfortunately, the soundwas possibly worse than the visuals). Later, a slave—named D’Artagnan by the pretentious Candie (even though he has never read a word of Dumas and doesn’t speak a lick of French)—is ordered to be mauled to death by dogs.

As I watched, I thought: We don’t need to see the mauling. Just the disgusted look on Schultz’s face; the seething fury in Django’s eyes would be more than enough. In fact, they might be more effective. But that’s not Tarantino’s style. He’ll show us the dog mauling every single time.

With Tarantino, you’ve got to take the good excesses with the bad ones. In the end, it’s more than worth it.