My Story Without Me: Harriet, A Black Female Perspective

I feel inclined to inform anyone who takes the time to read this post the process of its conception. I originally planned to entitle this article “Why I Won’t See the New Harriet Movie,” but I feared to execute a superficial discourse on a topic so prevalent to the black collective. Seeing the film actualized…

Luce, A Black Female Perspective

An expository essay sits at the core of Julius Onah and JC Lee’s drama Luce. The title character Luce, a high school senior, lauded as a scholar, athlete, and debator, tackles a new path when he writes a paper in the voice of black revolutionary Frantz Fanon. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon asserts…

How The Lion King Shows Us Who’s Still King

Claims that reference Disney’s The Lion King as visually and thematically violent, will prompt many to see King Mufasa hanging off a cliff before falling to his death as his young son Simba watches in a youthful confusion. However, to assign the film’s violence to one fictional scene would be a grave oversight. The Lion…

The Last Black Man in San Francisco, A Review

San Francisco native Jimmie Fails is the force behind The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a film about his experience in the gentrified Fillmore District.  The film follows Jimmie Fails, a character Fails’s names and molds after himself.  Literally equipped with only the clothes on his back, Fails is  a young black man seeking…

Ma, Revenge of the Mammy: A Black Female Perspective

Ma, presents a nuanced mammy figure in leading lady Octavia Spencer, who uses complacency as a means of entry to implement her retaliation. Sue Ann Ellington (Octavia Spencer) is a psychologically scarred girl inside a middle-aged woman’s body. Sue Ann, in love with a popular white male, believes she is to perform oral sex on…

The Master’s House: The Intruder, A Review

The Intruder marks the latest edition in the predictable suspense genre perpetuated by attractive non-white actors. The film casts Meagan Good as Annie, a leading yet color blind role alongside a similarly colorless Michael Ealy who plays her husband, Scott. They play a young couple seeking to start a new chapter of their lives and…

It’s Not ‘Us’ it’s Them: Jordan Peele’s Us and the Social Reproduction of the Invisible Man (Spoilers)

In its contemporary context, blackness assumes a violent coupling. Filmaker Jordan Peele (Get Out) tackles this coupling in both a literal and figerative sense with his latest release Us. Peele depicts humans as “coupled” by a being who mirrors their exteriority. In challenging the presumed singularity of identity, the coupled being obscures reality, simultanously inciting…

If Beale Street Could Talk, A Review 

I always desired to see a black love story on screen. Not a rom-com, or later-in-life love (though this would be nice too), but an authentic love story with young, black lovers. I know this could never be The Notebook, that though there would be a happily ever after, it would not be conventional because…