“To watch Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter is to take a master class in image construction. In 2011, she severed professional ties with her father and former manager, Mathew Knowles, who’d had a strong hand in controlling her image. In the nine years since, she has evolved dramatically as a […]
At SyFy Fangrrls, Stephanie Williams writes about Justin Dillard’s Sweetheart (2019). “The horror genre can be a powerful vehicle to tell the struggles of marginalized groups of people. When these stories are created by the very people who know these struggles in their everyday lives, the impact is […]
Bernard Rose’s Clive Barker’s Candyman is an intensely 1990s film. Characters smoke a LOT inside public places. A senior professor, Philip Purcell, refers to our main character Helen (Virginia Madsen) and research partner/Black Best Friend trope Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons) as “my two most beautiful graduate students” and there […]
Graveyard Shift Sisters suggests 28 Black women filmmakers and the horror films they made–with links!
Neely Tucker writes about Negro Romance, a 1950s American romance comic focused on Black characters, for the Library of Congress blog. “It was startling and rare for its positive depiction of African Americans in the era, particularly in its portrayals of young black women as romantic heroines. But […]
At BFM, Kimberly Nichele Brown consider Octavia Spencer’s role in Tate Taylor’s Ma (2019). “Ma offers viewers a new archetype of black womanhood–the black female suburbanite. Unlike earlier representations of middle-class black women that can be readily subsumed under the archetype of the ‘black lady,’ instead of respectability […]