Real Journalism written by people
Our tech-dominated society is generous with its glimpses of dystopia. But there’s something especially chilling about the captive audience meetings in the documentary Union, which screened at the New York Film Festival and is currently playing at IFC Center. Chronicling the fight of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), led by Chris Smalls, to organize the Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Staten […]
The Origins of Lovecraft Country Lovecraft Country is one of HBO’s newest series based on author Matt Ruff’s 2016 best-selling novel, Lovecraft Country. Both the series and novel reference the work of another famous author, HP Lovecraft (Howard Phillips Lovecraft) whose earlier works made use of themes that dehumanized people of color. However, the HBO series created by Horror […]
To flatten the curve of the coronavirus, all New York City movie theaters are indefinitely closed, and New Yorkers are urged to stay indoors except when absolutely necessary. For those who miss being able to venture all around Brooklyn, here are four easy-to-find, contemporary films set in the borough’s neighborhoods that don’t typically get featured in cinema all too much. […]
With all new releases on hold and movie theaters closed indefinitely, the film industry is in a dire place. But delays are nothing new to Hollywood. Here are four films, delayed in their own time, that can help make sense of your new life under quarantine. Ad Astra When Disney executives purchased 20th Century Fox in 2018, they found they […]
If any character stands at the heart of Westworld’s narrative over its now three-season run on HBO, it’s Maeve (Thandie Newton). Over the past three years, the bordello-madame-turned-sentient-android, a creation of a faceless entertainment corporation, has awakened to greater ambitions than the simple genre tropes she came into being with, only to realize that there isn’t anything for her outside […]
Everyone knows Jimmy Stewart couldn’t ever play anything but Jimmy Stewart. He never lost the mid-Pennsylvania drawl that’s given rise to thousands of impressions, poor and expert alike (mine’s alright, but see Dana Carvey for a particularly good one). And his narrow, six-foot-three frame lent him a loping, awkward on-screen presence that is a far cry from the preternatural wit […]
A people frozen in fear cried out, “Save us! Our kids need something to watch,” and Bob Iger listened. Disney+ released Frozen II three months in advance of its planned streaming date in response to pandemic-induced anxiety, boredom, and spiritual malaise. We streamed it the day it became available on home media from an undisclosed safe house on Long Island. […]
In late 2015, I browsed through the sometimes strange, uncharted corners of YouTube (as I regularly do) – laptop on belly, fingers (middle and pointer) on mousepad, I discovered The Grapevine TV, and haven’t stopped watching since. To see long-table conversations with numerous intelligent and expressive young black people, discussing topics with such kitchen-table honesty, for me, was a dream […]
Since the advent of VHS, discerning moviegoers have known that “made for television” and “direct to video” were kisses of death – signals the movie they were about to see, God help them, was the lowliest junk. Nascent cable channels and the dustiest recesses of Blockbuster were where the schlockiest horror, hardest soft-core, and cheapest action flicks were dumped by […]
It’s never “just a movie.” No matter the pedigree, quality, or budget, filmmakers use their medium not just to tell stories and entertain but to engage viewers in some kind of sociopolitical-economic commentary, regardless if it’s Steven Spielberg or Jane Campion or Roger Corman or Ed Wood behind the camera. And when some director deflects with “it’s just a movie,” […]
Fetishizing Black men The thirst for gratification, validation, and power often leads many men, prominent and not, to destroy their own lives as well as the lives of others. The story of Ed Buck and his victims is one that involves wealth, deadly fetishes, meth, and racism. Here’s what you need to know. Fetish: a form of sexual desire in […]
Orson Welles once described Harry Lime, his character in The Third Man (1949), as the greatest star part ever written. “It’s where they talk about you for an hour and then you appear,” he explained to friend and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. It took 70 years, but Welles’s Lime has a challenge for star-part supremacy in Toni Servillo’s Silvio Berlusconi — […]
Dag Hammarskjöld was a Secretary General of the United Nations, a Nobel laureate, a staunch anti-imperialist, and, according to a certain Jack Kennedy, “the greatest statesman of our century.” On September 18, 1961, while en route to a small Rhodesian airport, his plane crashed, killing all on board. In his newest film, Cold Case Hammarskjöld, Danish documentarian and provocateur Mads […]
