Tag: thrillers

Cinema in 2023 boasted a slew of surprise hits and surprise flops, but one constant was the Black presence in horror. Not necessarily a year of earth-shattering accomplishments, 2023 was for Black horror more about consistency and variety, broadening the typical Black roles into period pieces, ghost stories, mad...

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner meets Rosemary’s Baby in Kindred, a polished, well-acted British thriller whose intriguing potential ultimately devolves into a ball of toothless frustration. The story revolves around Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance), a black woman whose white live-in boyfriend Ben’s (Edward Holcroft) family is a bit...clingy. When he...

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...

Originally titled Guardian of Eden, The Good Wifey changed its name presumably to capitalize on the success of the TV show The Good Wife, even though the first title actually makes more sense for the story. It features a character named Eden, after all -- a little girl who’s...

Because pain often fuels creativity, one of the unintentionally positive consequences of the Trump administration's weaponization of intolerance, impropriety and disinformation is that it has provided plenty of fodder for provocative, sociopolitically inclined genre cinema, like the Purge franchise. In particular, the current culture of xenophobia has proven to...

Having rewatched the original Jacob’s Ladder recently, I found that, although the whole “shaky head” effect has become something of a horror cliche over the years, it holds up well as a visually striking and narratively challenging -- but ultimately rewarding -- paranoid thriller with a poignant emotional core....

Over the past decade, suspense thrillers with black protagonists have multiplied to previously unknown heights, and like all great cultural developments on planet Earth, we have Beyonce to thank. The success of her 2009 film Obsessed helped convince major Hollywood studios (or more precisely, a single studio, since most...

Ma is two movies in one, and which one you experience may depend on whether you’re black or you’re white. Think of it as a racial Rorschach test. On the surface, its plot doesn’t have much to do with race. It’s basically an intergenerational take on the “psycho stalker thriller”...

What Inhumanity lacks in budget, it makes up for in reckless ambition. With a sprawling slasher-thriller-action-sci fi-mystery-suspense story that incorporates serial killers, police corruption, medical experimentation, an international crime ring, a murder whodunit, a love triangle and a myriad of crosses, double-crosses and plot twists, it admirably aims for...

Human trafficking is one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises worldwide, one with a disturbingly low level of public awareness and an even lower rate of prosecution, so who better to raise public consciousness regarding this social epidemic than...the guy who brought us Meet the Blacks? Deon Taylor has one of...