Black Book

Dec 17, 2021 — A Nicole Brenez dossier and writing on Melvin Van Peebles and Nicolas Cage are among this week’s highlights.

Oct 30, 2012 — All of them actors? Nearly everyone wears a mask in Roman Polanski’s devilishly clever work of horror.

Jul 24, 2017 — In Issue 13 of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, editors Loretta Goff and Caroline V. Schroeter “bring together eight articles from around the world that interrogate the representation of race, ethnicity and identity on screen.”Kenta McGrath writes about...

May 21, 2018 — Movies you may not care about are inspiring some writing you won’t want to ignore.

Oct 15, 2050 — Voice-over narration has existed since the beginnings of cinema and has been an integral part of some of the great masterworks of narrative film, from The Magnificent Ambersons to Double Indemnity to Jules and Jim to Taxi Driver. It spans...

Dec 29, 2008 — If I had not seen The Lady Vanishes at the age of seven, I might never have become a film critic. I was the fifth child of parents well into middle age: clearly an “accident,” as I was ten-years-plus younger...

Miriam J. Petty is an associate professor in the department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. Her award-winning book Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood explores the limits and possibilities of Black stardom.

Racquel Gates is an associate professor of film at Columbia University. She is the author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2018) and is currently writing her second book, Blackness and the Invention of...

May 1, 2024 — Films by Horace Ové, Menelik Shabazz, John Akomfrah, Isaac Julien, and more depict Black lives in a tumultuous era.

Jul 14, 2015 — Carroll Ballard’s film is a work of rapture, a mesmerizing adventure that envelops the viewer in the beauties of the natural world.