TV amp; Movies Reviews

It’s hard to watch Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom — George C. Wolfe’s screen adaption of the seminal August Wilson play of the same name, from 1982 — without remembering that it’s Chadwick Boseman’s last movie. (The movie, which opens in limited theatrical release this week, will have a streaming release, …

“How do you sleep at night?” a prospective roommate asks Harper (Myha’la Herrold), the heroine of HBO‘s new, London-based drama Industry, about her work on the trading floor of an international bank. “That level of self-interest is just toxic, isn’t it?” “That’s kind of reductive,” argues Harper, who once wrote …

“Why is it that us people of color are always having to stand for something, or say something in our work?” Keef Knight complains. “That’s why I keep it light.” Keef (played by Lamorne Morris), the hero of Hulu’s new comedy Woke, is a writer and artist on the verge …

Bethan Gwyndaf isn’t the most popular girl in her high school. She’s not the most athletic, nor the most glamorous. And though she seems quite clever, she’s not making much of an academic impact, either. But there is one thing Bethan is better at than anyone else, even if none …

No, it’s not really a “movie” in the sense of an all-out, bells-and-whistles Hollywood extravaganza. The Hamilton that debuts on Disney+ starting July 3rd is a live-performance film of Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s ground-breaking, history-making Broadway musical that told the story of Alexander Hamilton (“the ten-dollar Founding Father”) in an electrifying, hip-hop …

Expect the unexpected from this teasing psychodrama about Shirley Jackson, acclaimed horror author of The Lottery, a short story first published in The New Yorker in 1948 and a literary lightning rod ever since for its depiction of ritualistic violence in contemporary, small-town America. Until her death in 1965, at …

This piece originally ran as part of 2020 Sundance Film Festival coverage. Even if you didn’t know Drew Dixon’s name, you definitely knew the fruits of her labor. The daughter of Washington, D.C., mayor Sharon Pratt and a Stanford alumna, she was an unabashed music fan. Dixon especially loved hip-hop, …

Now that it’s one of the most beloved comedies on streaming, across multiple generations, it can be hard to remember that The Officewas not well-received when it debuted on NBC in the spring of 2005. It’s not just that the mockumentary format was relatively new to American TV, but that …

Produced by Michelle and Barack Obama and directed by Nicole Newnham with Jim LeBrecht, this indispensable documentary defines what it means to call a movie “inspiring.” Their raucous fist-bump of a film is a 1950s origin story about Camp Jened, affectionately nicknamed “Crip Camp,” a New York summer getaway for …

Whether you were around in 1977 when creator George Lucas first unleashed his cultural behemoth in theaters, or you just started binge-watching the whole thing yesterday on your phone, Star Wars is undeniable — just as skipping the ninth (and, so they claim, the last) is unthinkable. All that’s left …