‘Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul’ Is A Sharp Examination Of The Black Megachurch

It’s fitting that Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul opens with Black Jesus. Christianity stands at the foundation of the lives of many Black people across the globe. The Black American church, in particular, has origins that begin amid the transatlantic slave trade. It is a pillar in the Black community that has remained prominent as a place of worship, service, fellowship, and so much more from the Reconstruction Era into the present. 

Writer/director Adamma Ebo’s dark comedy is a striking commentary on what Black church culture has become. Instead of places of refuge for Black people from all walks of life, many congregations now center on showmanship, greed, deep-seated misogynoir, hypocrisy, and bigotry. 

Continue reading at ESSENCE.

The Many Lives of Regina King

Treacherous Trudy Smith was a bold and brazen Black woman who thrived in the Wild West. Living on the edge, Trudy made a name for herself by pickpocketing. Though little else is known about her, director Jeymes Samuel knew he needed someone legendary to bring Trudy to the big screen in The Harder They Fall. Naturally, he turned to Academy Award-winning actor Regina King.

Continue reading at Netflix’s Tudum.

‘The Harder They Fall’: Inside the Very Real History of Jeymes Samuel’s All-Black Western

Before the opening credits of Jeymes Samuel’s “The Harder They Fall” splash across the screen, outlaw Rufus Buck (Idris Elba) has already murdered two people,  irrevocably changing a young boy’s life and setting the stage for an epic-scale shoot-em-up in the process. Set in the Old West, the Netflix feature has all the bells and whistles of a traditional Hollywood Western, but Samuel’s debut feature isn’t just a new spin on classics of the genre like “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” or “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.” This narrative is grounded in actual history.

Samuel’s world is populated by characters named after real-life Black figures who lived (and sometimes caused chaos) in the Old West. For Samuel and his star Jonathan Majors, who plays the revenge-minded Nat Love, it was about unearthing the true history of the American West and getting into the hearts and minds of lives lived and lost without the narrative of slavery or oppression. Just as essential: finding a way of turning that history, one rarely explored on the big screen, into a brand-new cinematic adventure.

Continue reading at Indiewire.

Regina King's 'One Night in Miami' is Immaculate

Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Sam Cooke, and Malcolm X were towering men with different ideologies, but they were also good friends. In her feature film debut, One Night in Miami, Regina King reaches back some fifty-plus years in the past to extend her lens and capture these men at various points and stages in their lives. In a well-imagined, thoughtful, and beautifully shot movie, she pulls them inward toward one another on an ordinary evening just before everything changed. 

One Night in Miami opens in 1963. Ali — known then as Cassius Clay, is in the boxing ring in London raging against Henry Cooper. Halfway across the world, Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) can feel his star power starting to wane after a less than stellar performance at New York City’s Copacabana. Down South, Brown (Aldis Hodge) has returned home to St. Simons Island, Georgia, to seek advice from whom he perceives to be an old friend. In Queens, X is trying to determine how to distance himself from the Nation of Islam and his mentor, Elijah Muhammad. 

Continue reading at Showbiz Cheatsheet.

On Barry, Baldwin and the Black Female Narrative In ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’

When it comes to cinema —and with mainstream films, in particular, Black women aren’t often the narrators of their own stories. In those rare cases when we are the main subjects in narratives about Black love or the Black experience, we are gagged and bound —relegated to filler material, helpmate roles or figures who solely exist for the male gaze. James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk refuses to place this injustice on Black women and with his film adaptation of the stunning work, director Barry Jenkins quiets other voices so that the Black female voice can soar. 

If Beale Street Can Talk is love ablaze. The narrative follows 19-year-old Tish Rivers (portrayed by Kiki Layne), and her childhood best friend turned lover, Alonzo "Fonny" Hunt (portrayed by Stephan James) who become enchanted in their romance. Tragically, just as they begin to plot for the future, Fonny is wrongfully accused of rape and thrown into prison. Set in Harlem during the 1970s Jenkins’ film sweeps gently between the past and the present as Tish struggles to press forward seeking to clear Fonny’s name while growing their child in her belly. 

Though Fonny is the one who must directly contend with the injustices of the American penile system— it's Tish and the women around her — her mother Sharon (Regina King) and older sister, Ernestine (Teyonah Parris) who feel the gut-wrenching after-effects of his imprisonment. It's these three women who band together on Fonny’s behalf, enacting a plan of attack to find a lawyer and get his accuser to recant. There is an overarching thread of Black feminism in the film. Though men— namely Fonny and Tish’s fathers (Colman Domingo and Michael Beach respectively) take action in the background, the women propel things forward in the foreground. It’s Sharon who dries Tish’s eyes as she weeps alone at night and travels to Puerto Rico in search of Fonny's accuser. It's Ernestine who uses her connections to secure a lawyer on Fonny's behalf. 

Continue reading at Shadow and Act.