Tag: racism

The original Tales from the Hood arrived in the midst of the "urban" cinema movement of the '90s, providing a genre spin on the racial and social consciousness of trailblazers like Spike Lee, John Singleton and Julie Dash. More than two decades later, as social consciousness has evolved into...

Square-jawed white guy Jake (Andrew Brooks Gagne) is having a bad day. First, he wakes up late for his job interview. Then, his car won't start, so he hops a train...and immediately falls asleep, missing his stop. Did I mention he’s also forgotten his phone? It seems punctuality and...

Every movie in the Purge franchise has been more overtly sociopolitical than the one before it, and The First Purge takes the series to new, gloriously radical heights in a powerful, if unsubtle, expression of the fear, frustration and anger of people of color in the United States. It's...

An unspecified amount of time after The Purge: Anarchy, Leo (Frank Grillo) is working as head of a security team guarding independent presidential candidate Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell). Roan has based her campaign around opposing the annual Purge, a cause that Leo can get behind -- or in...

A year after the events of The Purge, The Purge: Anarchy focuses on a group of disparate individuals in downtown Los Angeles on the night of the Purge of 2023. Shane (Zach Gilford) and Liz (Kiele Sanchez) are a couple on the verge of separating who are heading to...

In the year 2022, unemployment and crime are down to historic lows, thanks to an annual ritual known as the Purge. During the 12-hour event, which commences at sundown and ends at sunrise, all crime (with a few noted exceptions, such as assassinating high-ranking government officials) is legal, and...

Watching Get Out in the theater in 2017, I couldn't help but think about the movie The Invitation from the previous year. Both films have a similar setup: an interracial (specifically, black and white) couple heading to a remote get-together whose hosts turn out to have dark ulterior motives....

As an American, I'm fairly comfortable relating the portrayal of black characters in horror movies to the racial dynamics in the US as a whole, but it's always interesting to see how black characters in foreign films come across. The Argentine movie The Innocents (not to be confused with...

I usually don't review movies that are still exclusively playing in theaters -- really, for no better reason than it's hard to get the screen shots I usually utilize -- but Get Out is Important (with a capital "I") enough to warrant an exception. Between its artistic merit and...

In Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill!, writer/director Chad "No Relation to Bobby Mc" Ferrin showcased his fondness for recreating vintage exploitation fare and for casting black leads, and he continues to cultivate both of those preferences in the gritty thriller Parasites (on demand January 24 on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play,...