On July 12, 1991, Boyz n the Hood hit theaters nationwide after early screenings in Los Angeles and New York City. As a 12-year-old living in Germany at the time who saw it while visiting relatives in Five Points, Ala., that summer, the movie changed a lot for me. Apparently, I wasn’t alone.
Over the holiday break, I finally got around to watching Netflix’s Mudbound, last year’s period drama by director Dee Rees (who also wrote and directed 2011’s magnificent Pariah). The film was adapted from the 2008 Hillary Jordan novel about two families—one black and one white—attempting to stay afloat by…
In all truth, I was originally never going to tell this story. Because for the longest time, I didn’t even know if there was a story. I didn’t take what had happened to me seriously.
R. Kelly seems to have at least one celebrity who’s willing to support him publicly after reports of Kelly’s alleged “sex cult” where women are allegedly held hostage. A TMZ cameraman caught up with director John Singleton, and he said he doesn’t think it’s a big deal that parents of several young women have come…
Snowfall is proof that, more than 25 years after breaking through with his Oscar-nominated debut film, Boyz n the Hood, John Singleton hasn’t forgotten his roots or, most importantly, his responsibility.
A 31-year-old Chicago man is accused of stabbing his girlfriend’s 12-year-old daughter, leaving the child covered in blood and gasping for breath, before texting the child’s mother, “See wat u made me do...u gon pay fro this,” prosecutors say.
In what can only be described as the most covfefe’s of all covfefe’s, Baby Boy 2 might actually be a thing. What’s that you say? You didn’t know Baby Boy 2 was even a possibility because why would anybody sequelize (surprisingly, “sequelize” is a real word, in the same vein that Pinnochio was a real boy) a move that…
In 2015, John Singleton backed out of directing a biopic about Tupac Shakur. At the time, Singleton posted a lengthy message on Instagram, which stated that “the people involved aren’t really respectful of the legacy of Tupac Amaru Shakur.” It was alluding to the fact that the people behind the movie were suing…
OK, those Rebel commercials on BET haven’t exactly moved you, even if this show is intended to fill the void left by the midseason finale of Being Mary Jane. Because it’s 2017 and black TV isn’t as sparse as it once was, you still have those Netflix Dave Chappelle comedy specials to get to, not to mention countless…
You can’t call it a comeback because we’ve never been here before. To paraphrase actor Omar Dorsey, aka “Hollywood” from the TV show Queen Sugar, at Wednesday night’s African American Film Critics Association Awards, you can’t call it a rebirth because this is something in its infancy.
“In any type of writing program, they say to write about what you know,” John Singleton told Walter Mosley during a conversation following a 25th-anniversary screening of his classic film debut, Boyz n the Hood, in New York in June.
