With his remarkable feature debut His House, British writer-director Remi Weekes achieves what seasoned horror filmmakers struggle to pull off: tackling social issues like immigration, xenophobia, genocide and gender roles, alongside weighty themes like psychological trauma and grief, all while delivering throat-clenching scares. It’s one of the rare movies...
Dear White People’s Justin Simien lends his satirical eye to horror in Bad Hair, a blend of social commentary and pop culture nostalgia wrapped in a supernatural curse film disguised as a workplace dramedy. The end product lacks some of the racial nuances and character complexities of Dear White...
Buried within an avalanche of horror offerings featuring black folks during the Halloween 2020 season (including Antebellum, Bad Hair, His House, Spell, Vampires vs. the Bronx, Don’t Look Back, Synchronic and Kindred, plus family offerings The Witches and A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting and the ubiquitous TV series...
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,...
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,...
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;...
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...
*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...
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,...
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...
