As incidents of racial profiling and police brutality continue to make headlines, Body Cam -- the Mary J. Blige vehicle about an entity haunting police officers involved in the death of a black teen -- is as relevant a film as ever. Cinematically speaking, however, it’s a bit late...
It wasn’t too long ago (2013, to be exact) that a Cheerios commercial entitled “Just Checking” made national headlines for sparking a torrent of racial hatred online over its portrayal of an interracial (READ: BLACK AND WHITE) couple and their daughter. While it would be tough to say that...
Remember all those slasher movies back in the '80s that featured a black "final girl" vanquishing the unstoppable psychopathic killer during the nail-biting, climactic finale? Me neither. Lucky for us, Black Holler is here to re-envision that era with a modern parody/homage that is single-handedly more inclusive than the...
I was never much of an H.P. Lovecraft fan, even before I knew he was a grade-A bigot -- a fact that, when I discovered it, made me proud that the internal racism radar I'd honed growing up in rural Virginia had subconsciously steered me away from his writings.
I’ve...
I've never read the Spawn comic books, but I remember that when the movie adaptation came out in 1997, I felt a sense of eager anticipation because it was a black superhero film that wasn’t a cheesy kids flick like The Meteor Man, a silly spoof like Blankman and,...
*SPOILER ALERT* In order to fully discuss this movie, I'll need to reveal its major plot points. Sorry.
Also: *IGNORANCE OF BRAZILIAN CINEMA ALERT* Sorry again.
Although the late Walter Hugo Khouri was a highly acclaimed and accomplished Brazilian director, his movies are ponderously difficult to find; at last check, only...
About 30 minutes into Antebellum, Eve (Janelle Monáe) tells fellow slave Julia (Kiersey Clemons), who’s eager to escape her captivity, “Be patient. Just keep going,” and I couldn’t help but think she was speaking to us in the audience, because the film was already amounting to an exercise in...
Friend of the World is an odd, interesting little movie that defies easy categorization from the perspective of both genre -- combining horror, sci-fi, heady drama and even brief comedy -- and length -- clocking in at a short-film-with-feature-aspirations 50 minutes. Even its format is hard to pin down;...
Selling Vampires vs. the Bronx as “Attack the Block meets The Lost Boys” might be accurate, but it does a disservice to the film by setting an impossibly high standard that it can’t hope to reach. Judged on its own merits, however, Vampires vs. the Bronx is a rollicking,...
Tales from the Hood was woke before woke was woke, addressing issues that are still central to the social justice conversation today, from police brutality to institutional racism to the socio-economic conditions of the inner city. As “hood cinema” fell out of favor by the turn of the century,...
