Fences
If you’ve ever seen or read an August Wilson play, you know that writing is how the late playwright processed the world around him – a magnificently black world filled with funk and nuance in which language plays a central role. For Wilson, though, learning how to work with that language as a writer didn’t happen overnight. “For the longest time I couldn’t make my characters talk,” Wilson told me several years ago before his death in 2005. “I thought in order to incorporate the black vernacular into literature, the language had to be changed or altered in some way to sound more clear … until I realized that it’s no less romantic and meaningful to say, ‘It’s cold outside.’” As a play, Wilson’s Fences, which tells the story of a working-class black man – who was denied a baseball career in the major leagues – trying to raise his family in mid-century Pittsburgh, gives us that blunt romance and powerful meaning. As a movie, it gives us Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. Enough said.
Fences is on nationwide release now
Get Out
I don’t go in for horror films at all – not even horror film parodies – but I also can’t think of a brighter, more innovative voice in film right now than Jordan Peele, one half of the masterful sketch comedy series Key and Peele, which he co-created with Keegan-Michael Key. And while the potentially great Keanu, co-written by Peele and Alex Rubin, was a disappointing failure, Get Out, which Peele both wrote and directed, looks legitimately genius. The premise is a pretty straightforward Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner setup – rich white girlfriend brings her smart, learned black boyfriend upstate for a weekend to meet the parents – what could go wrong? It’ll be awkward, parents will remark more than once on how articulate the black boyfriend is, lecture them both on how hard it will be to maintain an interracial relationship in this day and age, and then finally concede that love is all that matters. Or will it?
Get Out is released on 24 February
Hidden Figures
In America, when it comes to the mainstream celebration of black historical figures, we primarily see the spotlight shined on our athletes, entertainers and a handful of activists who generally get depoliticized posthumously. Seldom do we hear about engineers, innovators and mathematicians, much less our black women in those positions. It’s thrilling and really quite long overdue for a film like Hidden Figures, which tells the story of “colored computers” Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Johnson, who worked at Nasa in the early 1960s and played a vital role in getting John Glenn and the Friendship 7 into space. As Katherine Johnson, Taraji P Henson is on career-best form – pushing her glasses up on her nose, hustling to the coloreds bathroom carrying a stack of data research, doing mathematical equations on a chalkboard – creating a truly revelatory performance. Octavia Spencer as Dorothy and Janelle Monáe as Mary are icing on the cake. An added bonus comes in the form of Pharrell Williams, who is a producer on the film and wrote original songs for the soundtrack that give the movie a beautiful sense of joy.
Hidden Figures is on nationwide release now
I Am Not Your Negro
The thing about James Baldwin, beyond his utter brilliance and undeniable prescience as a writer and public intellectual, is that he was like the blackest man who ever lived. And he wore it like a badge of honor. In the newly Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro, Haitian-born film-maker Raoul Peck mines Baldwin’s unpublished writing about the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X to create an intellectual and visual mosaic that somehow captures Baldwin’s own very personal and stubborn sense of blackness. It hits hard, and the film will make you long for the leadership and integrity of Evers, King and Malcolm in these increasingly divisive times. But it will also, if only temporarily, let you sit in the glory that is James Baldwin’s company.
I Am Not Your Negro is out on Friday
Madiba
If you’re black in America and keep up with pop culture (and even if you don’t), you know that Black Entertainment Television (BET) has had some misses. But then they come through with original programming like The New Edition Story (which drew record ratings last month) and suddenly it feels like must-see TV. Now we have Madiba, starring Laurence Fishburne as Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid activist and former president of South Africa. The three-part miniseries – which premiered this week on BET as the network’s cornerstone Black History Month programming and is based on two Mandela autobiographies, Conversations with Myself and Nelson Mandela by Himself – chronicles Mandela’s life, fight for freedom and the tremendous sacrifice he made for the sake of his country.
Madiba started on 2 February and continues on 8 February and 15 February at 8pm on BET
Moonlight
From beginning to end, Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins and based on the play by Tarrell Alvin McCraney, is a shatteringly accurate meditation on what it means to be human. The story follows Chiron, a black boy growing up in Miami, through three stages of development, all equally layered, emotionally complex and viciously meaningful. Despite a deeply painful and abusive relationship with his mother, and a near lifelong suppression of desire, Chiron owns his every breath and negotiates with his mind in startling yet relatable ways. Brave is too banal; courageous seems silly. Chiron is fluid and broken, vivid and used. Chiron is all of us.
Moonlight is on nationwide release
The 13th
If ever there was a subject that needs the Ava DuVernay treatment, it’s the United States prison system and the glaring link between it and slavery. For decades journalists, academics, researchers and historians alike have presented clear and inarguable evidence that this country has the highest rate of mass incarceration in the world, and a disproportionate number of those who are imprisoned are black. Over and over, the same studies are conducted, papers, articles and books written (notably The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, who is interviewed in the film), initiatives launched (Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, is also featured) – and yet the US government continues to deny the obvious: the prison industrial complex is an extension of slavery. The title of the documentary refers to the 13th amendment to the US constitution: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” Well. Ms DuVernay did not come to play with anybody’s Alternate Facts.
The 13th is available on Netflix
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