It isn’t easy being transgender. For those of us who live in America, it’s about to get even harder. With the recent election of Donald Trump and the rush by Democrats to blame trans people for their loss (despite running away from our issues at every turn), the future can seem somewhat bleak. It is of some comfort, then, that our stories are still being told. But as shown by two recent Netflix releases, we’re both making strides, and taking steps back.

Based on the novel by Gregory Maguire, Wicked the musical debuted on Broadway in 2003, becoming one of those rare crossover stage hits that reverberated beyond the typical audience of Broadway fans and theatre kids and into the general consciousness. Yet despite its popularity, it's taken over 20 years to bring this Broadway juggernaut to the screen.

Even in a sea of nostalgia-driven legacy sequels, Ridley Scott's 2000 Oscar winner, Gladiator, feels like a strange candidate for the sequel treatment 24 years later. With its story complete and its protagonist dead, there seemed little point in revisiting this world.

On paper, Gia Coppola's The Last Showgirl seems like a perfect comeback vehicle for an actress like Pamela Anderson - an elegiac portrait of an aging showgirl facing the end of her career as her long running show on the Las Vegas strip is forced to close for good. Anderson, a model who's primarily known for her time on the TV show Baywatch in the 1990s, has often been used as a punchline, a living caricature of a "dumb blonde bombshell" stereotype, and a self-aware dramatic role like this could have been the perfect way to reclaim that narrative.

There will be others who will write far more eloquently about this film than I will, but I think it might be one of the most essential films of our time. No Other Land is a searing and devastatingly urgent portrait of the plight of Palestinians through the eyes of Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who form an unlikely friendship covering and protesting the Israeli destruction of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank.

Long lost works of art from the West African kingdom of Dahomey make their way home after being plundered by French colonizers in Mati Diop's quietly extraordinary documentary, Dahomey. Following 26 historical artifacts as they journey from French museums back to their homeland in modern day Benin, Dahomey explores the surprisingly complex politics behind this historic transfer through the eyes of those facilitating their arrival, concerned citizens of Benin, and even the artifacts themselves.

Adam Elliot's 2009 film, Mary and Max, felt like something of a minor miracle at the time, a work of stop-motion animation that dealt, both seriously and humorously, with decidedly grown up themes of depression, loneliness, and mental illness. Memoir of a Snail is Elliot's first feature since his acclaimed feature debut, and while it doesn't quite reach the heights of Mary and Max, it's still a lovely film in its own right.

It's hard to talk about Clint Eastwood's Juror #2 without talking about the shameful way it's been treated by Warner Bros., who gave the film an incredibly limited run with no plans for expansion, despite Eastwood being a consistent moneymaker for the studio with his midbudget, adult oriented dramas such as The Mule and Sully, and American Sniper. Eastwood, now 94 years old, is an American legend, and while he isn't the only aging filmmaker who's struggled to find financing for their late period projects, it is somewhat shocking to see such a reliable, no-nonsense filmmaker get pushed aside in this manner.

On paper, the mixture of Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in the first English language feature by Pedro Almodóvar sounds like a can't miss prospect. The basic ingredients are all there, bright colors (that red lipstick!), women in crisis, a sensually moody score by Alberto Iglesias, but The Room Next Door feels strangely cold and distant, a germ of an idea that never seems to fully get off the ground.

Director Robert Zemeckis was arguably one of the biggest filmmakers of the 1980s and 90s, delivering mega-hits like Back to the Future (1985), Romancing the Stone (1984), Forrest Gump (1994), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1992), Contact(1997), and Cast Away (2000) throughout those two decades. Things changed in the 2000s, however, as he became fixated on mo-cap animation, as films like The Polar Express (2004), Beofulf (2007), and A Christmas Carol (2009) came to dominate his filmography.