Click here to listen to the interview. I’ve lived in San Francisco for many, many years, and yet I’d never heard the story of Charlie Walker, an African-American man with a dream and a real gift for playing the system against itself. I was delighted to learn about that part of my city’s history… Read More »
EMERGENCY
EMERGENCY starts with Sean (RJ Cyler) and Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) attending a class called Blasphemy and Taboos, taught by a perky British woman who, after reminding her students that their syllabus contained a trigger warning about this class, confronts them with the n-word. Not just projecting it onto the classroom screen in huge letters,… Read More »
CANDYMAN
CANDYMAN wants to do more than creep you out with mere gore. To that end, this sequel to the original does more than ignore the three subsequent films in that previous franchise, though it does, like those other films, drench the screen in blood from time to time. Here, though, the true horror that it… Read More »
RISE AGAIN: TULSA AND THE RED SUMMER
Anticipating the centennial of the Tulsa race riots and massacre in 1921, Dawn Porter wanted to do more that remember that criminally ignored chapter in American history. The resulting documentary, RISE AGAIN: TULSA AND THE RED SUMMER, recounts a part of our history that had, similarly, been ignored by all but the survivors, and their… Read More »
JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH
The religious overtones of JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH come towards the end of this searing examination of racial politics during the 1960s. And when they arrive, in a sequence that is most assuredly a shout-out to the Last Supper, director/co-writer Shaka King has earned the right, and then some, to invoke the metaphor. The… Read More »
ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI…
The story of ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI was inspired by actual events, which leaves plenty of room for speculation about what Malcolm X, Cassius Clay (shortly to become Muhammad Ali), James Brown, and Sam Cooke talked about in that motel room on February 25, 1964. If it was less the dialectic presented here, what each… Read More »
ANTEBELLUM
Of the many neat twists in ANTEBELLUM, the most disturbing of all is the one that concerns the state of race relations in the modern day, and how slavery still informs it. By contrasting the subtle, and not so subtle, micro-aggressions forced upon people of color in the present with the brutality of slavery as… Read More »
THE GLORIAS
Click here for the flashback interview with Julianne Moore for FREEHELD. Julie Taymor, a visionary director if there ever was one, has done more than merely work around the inherent artificiality of the cinematic biopic. Rather, she has used it to excellent advantage in THE GLORIAS, a consideration of the life, and political education, of… Read More »
BURDEN — Andrew Heckler and Robbie Brenner Interview
Click here to listen to the interview. When Andrew Heckler first heard the story of how an African-American clergyman, Rev. David E. Kennedy, shepherding a flock in a small southern town, put his principles to work in order to save the soul of a Klan member, Michael Burden, who had seen the light, he knew… Read More »
HARRIET
HARRIET achieves the proper, and richly deserved, tone of reverence for its subject, Harriet Tubman. That is, alas, its greatest failing. The astonishing life of one of the most courageous Americans who has ever lived is told in a series of set pieces, vignettes with all drama sapped from them as they take on the… Read More »