I will pretty much reiterate each and every time — all film is political to some regard, especially contemporary set film. Film entails conjuring up some sort of narrative at the hands of what? Imagination, one deduces. Creativity? Much of which still stems from one’s lived experiences and ingestion of media. Of course, having lived similar lives to some extent, it is expected that many of us will experience similar sentiments in general, let alone towards a specific subject matter — but more so, it seems that many of us will experience vastly different feelings at the same, or even greater, frequency. Original experiences are difficult to come by nowadays, especially due to the fact that many of us are so chronically online, sharing experiences that have never been so easily accessible or frequent in history, including the news, and the manipulation tactics that come baked right into it.
One Battle After Another just took home Best Picture at the recent Academy Awards, signaling what most film enthusiasts and aficionados deem personal, relevant, and reflective of their current lived experience — and in this case, the politics of the United States. Paul Thomas Anderson’s political thriller showcased white nationalism, intergenerational struggle, and the trauma passed down through bloodlines, alongside all the complications that arise during one’s most transformational and defining years.
Slanted and The Gates, two films released in close proximity, address these same issues from a deeply personal perspective — that of people of color navigating racial discrimination and bias in a country that simultaneously claims them and rejects them. One tells the story of a young Chinese-American girl who takes assimilation a skin cell too far. The other follows a group of Black college students navigating a hostile gated community and being scapegoated by a sinister pastor pulling strings from the shadows. Different entry points, same America.
Slanted (2026)
Release Date: March 13, 2026 (U.S. theatrical); world premiere March 8, 2025 at SXSW
Runtime: 102 minutes (1hr 42min)
Rated: R – language, some sexual material, teen drug use and brief violent content/bloody images
Production Companies: Mountain Top Pictures, Tideline Entertainment
Producers: Amy Wang, Mark Ankner, Trevor Wall, Adel “Future” Nur
Cinematography: Ed Wu
Editing: Ryan Chan
Music/Composer: Shirley Song
Director & Writer: Amy Wang
Cast: Shirley Chen, McKenna Grace, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Amelie Zilber, Vivian Wu, Fang Du, Elaine Hendrix
Amy Wang is pulling out the camp card for this one, intentionally satirizing — maybe a touch too directly at times — the struggle of assimilating into America and its culture. What she’s really interrogating is the cost of belonging, and how steep that price can get when the currency is your own identity.
Shirley Chen opens the film as Joan, a Chinese-American girl brought to the U.S. at a young age by her parents, who almost immediately becomes seduced by the social hierarchy of her school — one that glorifies the all-American, blonde-haired, blue-eyed ideal above all else. Chen is fantastic at letting Joan’s carelessness exude, particularly in how little she empathizes with her parents’ immigrant experience, and more importantly, how little she absorbs their love and acceptance of her as she already is. Her arc carries real weight, and the transition into her modified self — “Jo Hunt,” portrayed with pitch-perfect, almost smug ease by McKenna Grace, currently the reigning queen of every franchise she touches — is handled with both dark humor and a quiet devastation.
Wang sets the film’s world with intention. Living alongside Joan, her father Roger (Fang Du), and her mother Sofia (Vivian Wu) in Georgia, you feel the slow erosion of their identity — their absence from the world that surrounds them. Imagery and advertising reflect back a version of America that has no room for their faces. That absence seeps into Joan from a young age, beginning with something as small and loaded as the judgment of her food for its “smell” — a moment so mundane and so wounding it barely registers, which is exactly the point.
Joan’s discovery of her new identity is humorously manipulated by a social media app advertising a filter — “Ethnos” — that places Eurocentric beauty standards on your face: blue eyes, blonde hair, the full package. The same company, naturally, offers the surgery. Wang’s satirical instincts are sharpest here, where the pipeline from algorithmic beauty standards to bodily transformation is presented not as outrageous but as a completely logical next step. That’s the horror beneath the comedy.
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a film frequently compared to Slanted, is a strong recent example of camp and seriousness coexisting in uneasy, productive tension. Wang is more overtly satirical at moments, and the balance doesn’t always hold — there are stretches where the film reaches for gravity and the comedic scaffolding gets in the way. But ultimately it works, because Wang is clearly willing to take swings at the risk of failure, and that willingness to court divisiveness brings something genuinely new to the conversation. There’s valor in the attempt even when the execution wavers.
The themes Wang is working with — assimilation, alienation, the immigrant experience, self-image — manifest most powerfully in the contrast between Joan and Jo. Joan doesn’t come from a bad home. She’s close with her father, on decent terms with her mother, and not lacking in love. What she lacks is the emotional language to bridge the gap between her parents’ world and the one she’s desperately trying to enter. She can’t hold the conversation, so instead she changes her face. As Jo, the community’s comfort around her is immediate and visible. The popular crowd opens up. Olivia (Amelie Zilber), an influencer and aspiring actress who can’t attend prom herself, zeroes in on her as a candidate for prom queen — a title that has lived in Joan’s imagination as the ultimate symbol of American acceptance since she was old enough to want it.
Ultimately, Slanted is a story about losing yourself — your identity, your culture, the one that was handed to you with love and history by the people who brought you into this world. Forcing your genuine self out to satisfy expectations that are themselves manufactured and enforced. Wang uses satire and hyperbole to tell that story from a second-generation immigrant’s vantage point, a perspective rarely centered, but one that’s becoming more urgent by the day given the current political climate. Society and white nationalism serve as the film’s true antagonist — even taking human form in Olivia — but Joan’s relationship with her own self-worth is the accelerant. She didn’t need much convincing. That’s the most heartbreaking part.
The Gates (2026)
Release Date: Premiered February 24, 2026 in Los Angeles; wide release March 13, 2026
Runtime: 98 minutes (1hr 38min)
Rated: R – violence, language, some sexual references and brief drug use
Production Companies: Indy Entertainment, Rebellium Films, Core 4 Films
Producers: Nancy Leopardi, Ross Kohn, Gary Glushon
Cinematography: Ray Huang
Editing: Daysha Broadway
Music/Composer: Jongnic Bontemps
Director & Writer: John Burr
Cast: Mason Gooding, Algee Smith, Keith Powers, James Van Der Beek, Sofia Hublitz, Kylr Coffman, Elle Evans, Brad Leland
Where Amy Wang reaches for transformation — the physical, the bodily, the surgical — John Burr plants his flag in reality and dares you to look away. The Gates is not a film about changing yourself to survive whiteness. It’s about how whiteness responds when it simply finds you existing in its proximity.
Mason Gooding plays Derek, a college student dragged out for the night by his friends Tyon (Keith Powers) and Kevin (Algee Smith). Burr opens on Derek at home — his home, a wealthy neighborhood — before the trio’s first brush with racism arrives early and without fanfare, a quiet preview of everything the film intends to excavate. The night begins easily enough, but a traffic jam forces a detour through a gated community that proves far simpler to enter than to exit.
What’s smart about Burr’s setup is how fully realized these three men are before the walls close in. Derek is pre-law, pulled away from a night of studying. Tyon is a star college football player, his scholarship fragile and precious. Kevin is a car salesman who has “borrowed” a high-end vehicle for the evening. Each of them has a life, a story, a trajectory — and the moment they roll into that neighborhood, all of that nuance gets stripped away and replaced with one data point: the color of their skin.
The community’s true architect, Jacob (James Van Der Beek, in his final screen role), is gradually revealed to be the puppet master behind everything operating in that neighborhood — a system maintained quietly and ruthlessly for the comfort and benefit of its residents. Van Der Beek plays him with an unsettling calm, a man who has long since resolved any internal conflict about who he is and what he’s willing to do. It is a devastating, lived-in performance that deserves to be remembered.
The film’s most intellectually interesting tension lives in the dynamic between Derek and Kevin. Derek extends good faith to the people around him, approaching them as fellow human beings first. Kevin, grounded in a harder-earned skepticism, operates from caution and self-preservation — because when you’re Black in America, optimism can cost you. Burr presents both as justified, and the film is wise enough not to resolve that tension cleanly, because it can’t. Reality doesn’t.
Religion adds another dimension. Jacob, the antagonist orchestrating it all, is a pastor — and Burr uses that detail pointedly. Jacob invokes Christianity as a social currency, a presentation of decency that smooths over everything lurking beneath. “Let’s see if we can resolve this the Christian way,” he tells a cop, before the film reveals precisely what that means in his hands. Burr is interrogating something specific here: performative faith as a vehicle for hatred, a concealment strategy that grants its user legitimacy while the actual beliefs remain untouched and ugly underneath.
What The Gates ultimately exposes is the weaponization of automatic suspicion — racial profiling not as an aberration but as a system, humming along efficiently in a manicured neighborhood on an otherwise ordinary night.
Slanted and The Gates arrive at a moment that seems almost calibrated to receive them — not because the conversations they’re entering are new, but because the urgency feels ratcheted up in ways that are hard to ignore. Whether it’s the ongoing discourse around something as seemingly benign as a Sydney Sweeney ad, or the long, unresolved wound of Trayvon Martin’s case and every case that followed, both films are pulling from a well that has never run dry in this country.
Wang and Burr are approaching the same America from different angles and different aesthetics — one through satirical, campy hyperbole that transforms the body into a battleground, the other through grounded, suffocating thriller mechanics where the threat is never abstract. But the fear underneath both films is identical: the fear of a country that will smile at you, legislate at you, preach at you, and still, at the end of the night, refuse to see you.
Film won’t hand us the statistics or the policy solutions. What it hands us is the inside of an experience — the texture of it, the weight of it, what it actually feels like to move through the world in a body that certain systems were not designed to protect. That’s not nothing. That’s, in many ways, everything. And the fact that both of these filmmakers — Wang and Burr, two people of color making personal, political work in an industry that has historically made space for neither — are being seen and screened right now feels like something worth paying attention to, whatever your politics.