Will Smith is only the fifth Black man in history to win an Oscar for Best Actor. But on the night of his historic win, the biggest story has become his reaction to Chris Rock’s joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith. At first glance it was a throwaway line in the patter, suggesting Pinkett Smith would appear in G.I. Jane 2, a reference to Demi Moore’s 1997 movie in …
Read more
The 30th Annual Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards took over the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall in Los Angeles on Saturday, Feb. 24. The awards celebrated stars of both television and film with winners chosen by their peers in the guild. As Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy said while accepting his award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role: “This is extremely me…
Read more
Early on in Saint X, a psychological drama based on a novel of the same name that comes to Hulu on Wednesday, the Thomas family is riding a shuttle bus from the airport of the titular, fictional Caribbean island to their luxe resort, Indigo Bay. Shy, 7-year-old Claire (Kenlee Townsend) peers out the window. Outside, a Black girl around her age in a blue school uniform sticks out her tong…
Read more
Avatar: The Way of Water is already earning rave reviews from critics ahead of its Dec. 16 release. The sequel looks to be the sort of original epic that few directors beyond James Cameron get the budget to create these days. It took 13 years for Cameron to make the sequel; he had to, among other things, invent new motion capture technology that he could use to film underwater.
I…
Read more
By the time Octavia Estelle Butler published Kindred in 1979, she had begun to solidify her place in the science-fiction genre—no small feat for a Black woman in a world dominated by white men and their stories of colonizing planets and alien invasions. She had achieved moderate success with her first three books, Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, and Survivor— Read more
Kate Winslet is the reigning queen of the HBO miniseries. She redefined an iconic heroine in Todd Haynes’ Mildred Pierce and disappeared behind the grimace of an embattled small-town detective in Mare of Easttown, earning Emmys for both roles. And she may well win a third for her astute portrayal of the fragile, eccentric demagogue at the center of HBO’s The Regime Read more
Taika Waititi may be known as the director of box office hits like Thor: Ragnarok. But the multi-hyphenate—he’s also an actor, writer, producer, and TV creator—can’t easily be put in a box as just a blockbuster auteur; he is just as comfortable working on indie projects.
Similarly, his style as a filmmaker is an unpredictable mix of light and dark. In a fr…
Read more
And Just Like That… has been filled with shocking life changes for Carrie Bradshaw, most recently her controversial decision to get back together with her former fiancé Aidan for the fourth time. But in episode 9 of season 2, which dropped on Max on Aug. 10, the stylish Manhattanite considers a decision that’s truly unthinkable: selling her beloved Upper East Side apartme…
Read more
Viola Davis has always been a great actress. She was great before she won an Oscar (for her supporting role in Denzel Washington’s 2016 film version of August Wilson’s Fences), and even before her earlier nominations (for John Patrick Shanley’s 2008 Doubt and Tate Taylor’s 2011 The Help). In other words, she was great before legions of film cri…
Read more