Tag: African Americans

“Gaslighting in Sweetheart

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 […]

What Becomes a Legend Most?

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 […]

Decolonizing Mammy

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 […]