Tag: 2020s

In 2012, Liam Neeson made cinematic history by punching wolves in the face in The Grey. A decade later, in Beast, Idris Elba tells Neeson to hold his beer while he cold-cocks a lion. Such is the world in which we live today; everyone’s a showoff. Elba plays Nate Samuels,...

While American horror movies from Black creatives have gained a reputation in recent years (thanks in no small part to Jordan Peele) for incorporating racial and social commentary, the same can be said for black horror from around the globe. After all, black folks the world over have plenty...

I have selfish reasons for wanting to see Day Shift. Yeah, it’s a movie about a black vampire hunter and all, but it was also filmed in my stomping ground of the San Fernando Valley -- something I became acutely aware of months before its release when production shut...

*OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING* With the release of Jordan Peele’s eagerly anticipated third film, Nope, it’s fair to say that his filmmaking style has been established. A Peelian movie is horror-skewed genre fare that seeks to entertain but also convey underlying social commentary -- directly or indirectly racial in nature and...

I feel like at one point, Blackstock Boneyard’s intention was to be taken seriously. Marketed as being "in the tradition of Candyman," it was originally titled Rightful, which sounds like either a Civil Rights Movement period drama or a Kirk Cameron right-to-life wet dream. It’s based on the true...

In the US, Black domestic servitude still conjures antiquated images of Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen birthin' babies and whatnot, a concept that is, as they say, gone with the wind. In countries like Brazil and South Africa, however, domestic servitude goes hand in hand with Blackness, an ever-present...

The Summoned is well-made but by-the-numbers horror fare that relies on well-worn genre tropes -- the isolated location, the mysterious and most likely malevolent host, the creepy stranger who holds all the secrets, the foreboding dreams, the token black guy -- but for once, the black guy here is...

It will be interesting to see if, in a decade or so, there will have been established a very specific, very limited subgenre of film known as “COVID cinema.” These are not movies about COVID-19, mind you, but rather movies shot in and around the COVID shutdown of 2020-21...

Say what you will about The Asylum -- the poor quality of their films, their willingness to coast off the notoriety of bigger, better movies with “mockbusters” like Snakes on a Train and Independents' Day, the fact that their Sharknado films opened the floodgates for every Tom, Dick and...

We all heard about the strife that COVID-19 caused for Broadway performers who had to put their dreams on hold and find ways to eke out a living that didn’t include in-person song and dance numbers, but less publicized thespian victims during the COVID era were film actors who...