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Trailer Park: Shakespeare, Santa, and Spacey
Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking...
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10 Great New-to-Netflix Movies to Stream This Holiday Weekend
Another holiday weekend is upon us, with the Fourth of July luckily placed on a Friday for your three-day convenience. So you know what that means: lots of time on the couch, doing fuck all. But you...
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The 25 Best Coming-of-Age Movies Ever Made
Richard Linklater’s Boyhood continues its seemingly inevitable move towards world domination, expanding to more theaters over the weekend and capturing the imaginations and hearts of even the most...
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This New Study on Racial Diversity in Hollywood Isn’t Depressing At All!
Ha ha, not really, it’s totally depressing. The study, “Race/Ethnicity in 600 Popular Films: Examining On Screen Portrayals and Behind the Camera Diversity,” was released yesterday by the Media,...
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This Week’s Top 5 TV Picks
There are scores of TV shows out there, with dozens of new episodes each week, not to mention everything you can find on Hulu Plus, Netflix streaming, and HBO Go. How’s a viewer to keep up? To help you...
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How ‘Shots Fired’ and ‘Rebel’ Revise the Trope of the “Strong Black Woman”
When Scandal premiered on ABC in 2012, it was famously the first network drama with a black female lead since 1974’s Get Christie Love!, a cop show in the mold of Blaxploitation films that lasted just...
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How Six New Films and Specials Reframe the 1992 L.A. Riots
The parallel thinking that led to two separate super-sized treatments of the trial of O.J. Simpson in the same year – one a dramatized mini-series, one a multi-part documentary – was itself an...
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Why Does the New Tupac Biopic Leave Out ‘Poetic Justice?’ We Have a Theory!
The late Tupac Shakur’s electrifying debut performance as madman “Bishop” in Juice is his most iconic role, but he probably did his best acting in John Singleton’s 1993 Boyz n the Hood follow-up Poetic...
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This Week’s Top 5 TV Picks
Peak TV is a perplexing time, filled so often with wildly exciting premises and wildly unfulfilled promises. Allow us to guide you, then — on a weekly basis — through this thicket of ideas towards some...
View Article‘Shaft’ is a Case Study in How to Ruin an Iconic Character
There’s one word to describe Tim Story’s new riff (sort of a sequel, sort of a reboot, sort of a spoof) on Shaft, and that word is baffling. It’s hard to conjure up, even with the liveliest of...
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