Bad Black

May 10, 2011 — Something Wild asks the eternal question “What makes us happy?” But the answer it proposes is far from easily arrived at. It’s a boy meets girl story, certainly, but one that goes much deeper with that narrative than most films...

Dec 18, 1989 — When Tootsie opened in December, 1982, the ad copy read: “In the next 72 hours this desperate, unemployed actor will secretly audition for the female lead of a soap opera.”  That was the plot line to the movie even when...

Jun 29, 2021 — In Dee Rees’s ambitious and lyrical debut, the inner life of a queer Black teenager and poet is summoned in all its nuances and contradictions.

Jul 28, 2017 — We begin with the news, reported for days but now officially confirmed, that the New York Film Festival, whose fifty-fifth edition runs from September 28 through October 15, will close with the world premiere of Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel. For...

Mar 3, 2020 — American cinema is over 125 years old, and African Americans have been a part of it from the beginning. This participation has often been fraught, stymied, and curtailed, but the desire to use motion pictures to craft a self-image has...

Mar 30, 2022 — Step into spring with a collection of blaxploitation deep cuts and spotlights on Guru Dutt, Delphine Seyrig, and the early work of John Ford.

Feb 6, 2018 — “A jolt of a movie, Black Panther creates wonder with great flair and feeling partly through something Hollywood rarely dreams of anymore: myth.” So begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Most big studio fantasies take you out for...

Jul 11, 2017 — Let’s begin today with the listening and viewing tips, because New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis is Peter Labuza’s guest on The Cinephiliacs (85’38”). Among the topics discussed are “her childhood movie love of watching objects without inhibition and...

Feb 1, 1999 — After finishing Diabolique, heralded French director-screenwriter Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907–1977) confessed that all he had intended was to make a picture that would “amuse myself” and please a young girl who hid under the covers and asked her father to frighten...

Oct 7, 2022 — Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Assayas, Sally Potter, John Smith, Edgar Wright, and Ethan Hawke have a lot to say.