Luke Cage, Season 2: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Netflix has found its niche when it comes to its Marvel series. But not all of those series are created equal. Most…
Superfly: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
A couple of weeks ago I attended a media screening of Superfly, and I couldn’t help paying attention to the fact that…
Solo: A Star Wars Story: A Promising Prequel With an Even More Promising Lando
The trouble with prequels is that it’s hard to raise the stakes when you already know certain characters are going to…
Atlanta Is Back With More of That Weird Stuff
It’s been a minute—a president ago—since Atlanta’s first season entranced us. The show quickly became a career…
Tributes to Jermaine Dupri and Cameo Are Just the Reasons to Tune Into the Bounce TV Trumpet Awards
Last year’s Trumpet Awards on Bounce TV came just weeks after the black-focused network acquired the long-running show,…
Black Panther Delivers the Biggest, Blackest Superhero Movie Ever and It’s Just as Good as You Want It to Be
When I sat in the theater and screened Black Panther, I felt like the woman in the audience at the Five Heartbeats’ show
Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s Breakout Performance Anchors Powerful Young-Adult Novel-Turned-Sundance Film Monster
It’s maddening that a book written in 1999 still carries so much relevance in 2018. Nearly two decades ago, Walter Dean…
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle Is Good-Hearted Fun, With a Few Minor Exceptions
During the holiday season, there’s always that one movie that children drag their sulking parents to and then ask for…
Denzel Washington’s Roman J. Israel, Esq. Isn’t Exactly What You’re Expecting, but What You Might Need to See
I walked into Roman J. Israel, Esq. with an open mind. I knew that director Dan Gilroy’s previous film Nightcrawler was…
Mudbound Is Another Exhausting Tale of Inequality and Racism in America, but at Least It Was Executed Properly
When there’s historical blackness in film, it’s usually displayed through slavery or Jim Crow. There’s never really any…
‘She’s Gotta Have It’ ... but Do We?
I remember the first time I saw She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee’s groundbreaking, critically acclaimed and very first…
Crown Heights Exposes a Very Common American Problem: Wrongful Conviction
The time is 1980. The place is the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in New York City. The man is 18-year-old Colin…
We Need to Talk About Being Mary Jane
Mary Jane Paul has always been a mess, but her many, many faults are what made Being Mary Jane such an interesting…
If Game of Thrones Had Black Characters, This Week’s Episode Would’ve Been Totally Different
You can apologize now. Many of you thought I was reaching a bit when we first started this series, but as each episode…
The Dark Tower: Mediocre Marksmanship and Magical Negroes
The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption and The Shining are a trio of renowned Stephen King titles turned to film. And…
Did War for the Planet of the Apes Come for DeRay Mckesson or Did Hotep Twitter Go Too Far?
The Planet of the Apes movie series has always been racially problematic. Starting with the originals in the late 1960s…
Spider-Man: Homecoming Diversity Push Makes No Spidey-Sense
Spider-Man: Homecoming has a lot of heavy lifting to do for one movie. It has to continue the Marvel Cinematic…
Fist Fight: Charlie Day and Ice Cube Make Teaching Look Like WWE Monday Night Raw
Back when I was in high school, I always wondered if teachers ever got into fights with each other in the break room.…
Review: Moonlight Chronicles Discovering One’s Sexual Identity in the Worst of Circumstances
In Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ (Medicine for Melancholy) semiautobiographical coming-of-age story, we follow the three…