The Book of Clarence
The opening shot of Jeymes Samuel’s Book of Clarence shows several criminals nailed to crosses per the first century Roman method of capital punishment. In the foreground, a white figure…
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Just Mercy
Reproductive justice. Climate justice. Food justice. Social justice. Append the word “justice” to any other word and you’ve got a ready-made brand platform for niche activism. As cultural forces shape…
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The Last Black Man in San Francisco
At the end of the day, we’re all just looking for a place to call home. Movies have long wrestled with this sentiment and not just in a physical sense….
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A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich
Politicians, journalists and experts rarely agree, but they have all named the current opioid situation a plague. It’s an appropriate word, with historical and biblical connotations; in every generation, our…
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If Beale Street Could Talk
Barry Jenkins and Damien Chazelle both directed Oscar-nominated movies this year. The last time that happened was in 2017 when Chazelle’s La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best…
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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
My Spider-Man was the 1981 “Spider-Friends” version, complete with invented sidekicks, incomprehensible Saturday morning subplots, shoddy animation, and a little dog too (spoiler: they were all killed off by a…
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Claudine
“I have known this woman all my life,” Diahann Carroll writes in her autobiography.* “We grew up together in the same neighborhood.” Lest someone might interpret that statement as metaphorical,…
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Sapphire
“We’re all the children of God,” a black sophisticate remarks to her boyfriend, after he has interacted with the police. “Forget it.” The exchange is brief — the actor isn’t…
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Black Panther
I didn’t expect to feel tears stream down my face so shortly into Black Panther, but within the first few minutes of the film, I was already impacted heavily. In…
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Mudbound
As a child, like many others, I loved to play in the mud. We had a “sandpile” next to our barn that was about 25% sand with the rest dirt,…
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