Steve McQueen's 'Lovers Rock' Is a Sumptuous Display of Black Joy

Black joy undoubtedly exists. The diaspora would never have survived all that has been thrust upon it without these moments of levity. However, throughout the history of cinema, studios and filmmakers have made very little room for Black love, romance, lust, and sensuality. It is only in recent years following the twenty-year drought that existed between films like Love & Basketball, Love Jones, and even The Best Man that Black love has reemerged in cinema. Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock has solidified itself in this new emergence of Black passion, seen in recent films like Queen & Slim and The Photograph.

Set in London in 1980, Lovers Rock follows a group of young people as they descend on a house party to celebrate Cynthia’s (Ellis George) 17th birthday. Having enlisted her West Indian family’s help, we watch Cynthia’s mother and aunties working in the kitchen, preparing pots of curry goat and ackee and saltfish to sell. They take time to sway their rounded hips and sing-along to the radio between the chopping and stirring. 

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'Concrete Cowboy' is Warm, but not Quite Riveting

Cowboys are deeply embedded in American popular culture. After all, the Western genre dominated Hollywood box offices for years. Films like Once Upon A Time in the West and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly have become the standard for idyllic versions of the heroic cattle-header. Though his legacy stretches from the streets of South Central LA to North Philadelphia, the Black cowboy has been erased from the history books. However, with his coming-age-story, Concrete Cowboy, first-time feature filmmaker Ricky Staub is unveiling an underworld often overlooked while highlighting a young teen’s fragile road to manhood. 

Based on Greg Neri’s novel, Ghetto Cowboy — Concrete Cowboy follows Cole (a gripping Caleb McLaughlin), a teen boy living in Detroit with his single mother. Terrified for her son’s life and out of options following yet another school expulsion, Cole’s mother packs his clothing in garbage bags and drives the near 600 miles from Detroit to Philly. 

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'MLK/FBI' Strips Back the Legend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. To Reveal a Man With Strengths and Flaws

Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI opens in 1963 at the March on Washington. It was just five years before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s death and eight years after he was thrust onto the global stage as America’s moral leader. It was an arduous role for anyone to carry, certainly for a Black man who rose and fell amid some of the most tumultuous decades in our nation’s history. Yet, whether he was ready to shoulder this burden or not, Dr. King did so despite drastic attempts to undermine him at every turn. 

Using historian David Garrow’s book, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., as a framework and some of the FBI’s declassified files on King, Pollard unveils the FBI’s crusade against Dr. King the did not end until the day he died. Through stunning archival footage and modern-day audio interviews from people like Civil Rights leaders Clarence B. Jones and Andrew Young and historians like Garrow and Beverly Gage, MLK/FBI is as much about Dr. King is it is about J. Edgar Hoover and W.C. Sullivans’s obsession with him. The FBI was intent on dehumanizing King with a five-year-long campaign that involved wiretappings, secret recordings, and spying to ruin his public persona. It is a saga of a government agency gone rogue. 

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'Akilla's Escape' Is a Masterclass in the Duality of Manhood

The past has its way of catching up with us. It’s something Akilla Brown (Saul Williams) has always known, and in many ways, he’s accepted his fate. In Charles Officer’s fast-paced neo-noir, Akilla’s Escape, the director turns his lens on two versions of the same man. In the present, Akilla flies through Toronto’s underworld as a notorious supplier, increasingly wary of his high-risk lifestyle. In the past, Akilla is a 15-year old living in Brooklyn in the ’90s, terrorized by his menacing gangster father, Clinton (Ronnie Rowe), and helpless to help his broken mother, Thetis (Olunike Adeliyi), find a way out. 

‘Akilla’s Escape’ forces the past to collide with the present

At 40, the exhausted drug supplier can sense that his time is running out; he just doesn’t quite know when. Though he’s making plans to shutter his Toronto-based marijuana farm to go legit and open a dispensary, his boss and business partners are not on board. Still, troubled by memories of his childhood and determined to move in a different direction than he’s done for the past 25 years, Akilla’s mind made up. Everything changes for him one night when his past comes barreling into him. 

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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.

The Director in the Middle of the #CancelNetflix Backlash Speaks Out

Aside from rare examples like Crooklyn, Eve’s Bayou, and Beasts of a Southern Wild, Hollywood has dismissed the young Black female experience. But with her feature film debut, Cuties, French Senegalese filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré is putting the spotlight on Black girls while helping them reclaim their girlhood.

Doucouré won a distinguished directing award for Cuties when the film debuted at Sundance in January, but months later, she found herself in the middle of a media firestorm after Netflix released a shocking poster for its English-speaking audience. The poster showed a sexualized image of young girls that stood apart from the film’s religious versus secular context and nuance. Though Netflix has apologized for its failure, Doucouré has been the recipient of numerous death threats and personal attacks.

In recent days, the hashtag #CancelNetflix has trended in response. Some viewers find the film to sexualize young girls. Others point out that the film is the unfortunate victim of a poor marketing campaign and that critics took the poster out of context.

Set in present-day Paris, Cuties follows 11-year-old Amy (Fathia Youssouf), a recent transplant from Senegal who becomes increasingly enamored with her classmate Angelica (Médina El Aidi-Azouni), the queen bee of a group of schoolgirls who call themselves the Cuties. With her mother preoccupied by the devastating news that her husband has taken a second wife, Amy desperately throws herself into becoming a Cutie, even taking part in a dance competition with Angelica and her friends. Like most girls new to town, she just wants to belong.

Amid the film’s Netflix debut and the swirling social media scandal, Doucouré spoke with ZORA about Cuties, standing in her truth, and why this story is so important for her.

Continue reading at ZORA.

'Comfort Farms' Is A Stoic But Powerful Doc on the Veteran Experience

There have been many films that address the veteran struggle, from 1979's Apocloyspe Now to 1998's Saving Private Ryan and even Spike Lee's most recent film, Da 5 Bloods. These films tell the story of war heroes on and off the battlefield. Over the years, audiences have been captivated by the stories of these soldiers. We've watched them press forward during the war and into the eerily silent aftermath. Yet, despite our society's collective fascination with war, and the veterans returning home afterward, there have been very few films addressing their trials and triumphs from their own words. 

Director Carlisle Kellam gives the vets back their story in his stoic but compelling Comfort Farms. Though we praise our armed service members as heroes, society seems unable to grapple with how to help veterans truly return home and find their beat in their respective communities. Veterans Affairs in its current state was implemented during World War I. However, like any government agency dependent on funds and lacking resources, the VA can only provide so much help. In turn, many vets have had to find their own ways to cope with life-- and some of them have been incredibly destructive. That's where former combat Army Ranger Jon Jackson's Comfort Farms comes in. 

Named for Jackson's fallen Ranger brother Captain Kyle A. Comfort, the farm has become not just Jackson's sanctuary but one for vets across the nation. After attempting to take his own life following six tours oversees, Jackson decided to take back his narrative. He found purpose in the earth, in its dirt, history, and animals' life cycles. Set in central Georgia, the farm helps vets become butchers, farmers, chefs, and activists. Comfort Farms gives them something solid to lean into while they rebuild a sense of camaraderie and self that is often lost in civilian life. It also provides them with the opportunity to stretch their hands toward their community. The farm has become a new mission for these vets, one that teaches them how to eat, live, and thrive. 

One of the most profound things about Comfort Farms is Kellam's choice to intertwine the footage from the farms and the war zones. This allows the vets to reflect on their past and connect it to their present. Vets like Trenton Free, Forrest Giles, Scott Kennedy, Bryan Kyzar, and Cr Sabathne make it clear that PTSD shouldn't be a catch-all phrase for vets. It only affects some vets. For others, it’s a battle that they are fighting in everyday life.

The film might have been even more effective if the structure had been shifted just slightly, Setting the audience in the middle of the farm first before pulling us back on the battlefield, but it’s still a solid film.

Since this is farming, Kellam does not shy away from addressing and putting a spotlight on the butchering that comes with it. Still, as we watch Jackson reflect on the deaths of animals and even demonstrate it, it's done humanely and with compassion. It's not supposed to be comfortable. Instead, the Agricultural Cognitive Behavior therapy forces an emotional connection for the vets and the viewers. It's a feeling that may have previously been buried deep inside. 

Comfort Farms is not always an easy film to watch. In the beginning, as you're trying to sink into Jackson's story and the story of Comfort Farm, it feels at times unsettling. But that's precisely the point. By allowing these men to tell their stories, Kellam empowers these vets to take back their lives in a way that is healthy, active, and on their own terms, It's certainly not a pretty picture, but that's what makes it one of the most powerful docs on veteran experience out there. 

Comfort Farms won the  Grand Jury Prize at Film Invasion Los Angeles for Feature Documentary. It will be released this year on Video on Demand.

'No Church In the Wild' ALL EPISODES OUT NOW

On this Freedom Day, I am so proud to present No Church In the Wild, Leslie Wagner-Wilson’s harrowing story of faith and survival. The mini-series chronicles her time in The Peoples Temple through her escape from Jonestown, Guyana. It’s a story that has weighed heavy on my spirit since director Richmond Obeng introduced me to it many months ago.

I am so happy he brought me on along with Lindsey Addawoo to produce. This is just the beginning of our journey. ✊🏿✊🏾✊🏽 ALL EPISODES OUT NOW via YouTube.

“It is easier to forget than to remember.” Leslie Wagner-Wilson 🤎🖤