Tag Archives: tv-movie-features

At a time when the true-crime genre has reached a creative nadir, as streaming services churn out assembly-line products that prioritize shock value over victims’ stories — and even stoop to paying perpetrators for exclusive access — Surviving R. Kelly stands out. Premiering in January 2019, Dream Hampton’s docuseries painted …

Which movies can we legitimately claim are overlooked or underseen, two terms that are overused? Depending on where you’re standing, probably most of them. The movies most of us have heard about are a mere drop in the bucket of what’s being released. And that isn’t because of quality. Some …

Folks, it’s been another great year for movies, from Minions: The Rise of Gru to Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Theater chains continue their recovery from the Covid-19 shutdowns of 2020, with ticket sales projected to reach $7.4 billion for the year — still well below pre-pandemic totals, but a sign …

For those immune to the charms of Elon Musk’s Twitter™ — a Squid Game-like arena teeming with edgelords, crypto enthusiasts, men’s rights activists who resemble Pitbull, and daily spam messages touting “part-time work” — the current film brouhaha may have escaped notice. In short: a trio of films, eagerly anticipated …

In an undeniably great year for horror, the most unsettling scene from one of the more popular series featured a man offering his neighbor a sandwich. Granted, that man was cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, his neighbor the woman who got him evicted, and the sandwich possibly contained human flesh, …

There are all other legends, and then there is Pam Grier. She became the first and greatest Black female action hero of the Seventies, in blaxploitation classics like Coffy and Foxy Brown. She reigns as one of the all-time iconic Hollywood stars, from her Quentin Tarantino collaboration Jackie Brown to …

“I used to wonder who I would be if this hadn’t happened to me,” the young narrator of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking muses early on. The film quickly abandons that question, though, in favor of a more interesting one: Who will this child, and the other women of this drama, …

Did anyone in the mid-‘90s really think that Quentin Tarantino was at risk of being a two-hit wonder? Certainly there wasn’t much reason to expect him to drop as cool and calm a movie as Jackie Brown for his third feature. Jackie Brown turns 25 this Christmas. It still looks …

No one will accuseWhitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebodyof glossing over the turbulent life of Whitney Houston. In its two-plus hours, the movie, which was authorized by Houston’s family and was co-produced by her music mentor Clive Davis, features a multi-layered performance by British actress Naomi Ackie, whose lip-synching …

Kasi Lemmons had quite a few reservations prior to boarding the biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody. For starters, she’d run in similar circles to the iconic musician in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, back when Lemmons was acting in films like School Daze and The Silence of …