Tag: Colman Domingo

REVIEW: Candyman [2021]

Jared Mobarak

He found me. Despite its earned cult classic status, Bernard Rose‘s Candyman isn’t without fault. His decision to move Clive Barker‘s short story “The Forbidden” from a British neighborhood to Chicago’s Cabrini–Green projects to deal with the racial divide as well as the economical one in the text was as inspired as casting Tony Todd for his titular bee-infested boogeyman running on the fuel of a hive mind’s fear. Yet he still centered it all on a white savior’s shoulders in Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen). Rose flirts with the complexity…

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REVIEW: Zola [2021]

Jared Mobarak

Clean your butt! Twitter user A’Ziah King had the platform eating out of her palm for 148-tweets back in 2015. Everyone wanted to “hear a story about why [she] & this bitch here fell out” and waited patiently for each new mini chapter before the entire opus got screenshot, shared on every social media site, and inevitably crossed the radar of Rolling Stone‘s David Kushner to document what “really” happened for the magazine later that year. And since you can’t go viral to that extent without earning some attention from…

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REVIEW: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom [2020]

Jared Mobarak

I got my time comin’ to me. It’s all there in the opening scene. Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) belts “Deep Moaning Blues” to a full house in Georgia as her band accompanies from the back of the stage. Toledo (Glynn Turman) and Slow Drag (Michael Potts) hit their notes with feeling, keenly watching the subtle yet damning chaos about to unfold. Not only is trumpeter Levee (Chadwick Boseman) angled to serenade young Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige)—Ma’s “girl”—while Cutler (Colman Domingo) shoots a disparaging, fatherly look of judgment, he also dares…

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TIFF18 REVIEW: If Beale Street Could Talk [2018]

Jared Mobarak

Flesh of each other’s flesh. Fonny Hunt (Stephan James) puts out his arms for a hug upon seeing an old friend in Daniel (Brian Tyree Henry) after too much time and too many men their age have passed. Smiles and laughter enter the scene before they are soon replaced by beers and reminiscing. And then comes the hard truth of absence—the explanation of his disappearance. Daniel had been in jail two years for a crime he didn’t commit and Fonny feels for his plight. Despite anything he could possibly say…

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REVIEW: The Birth of a Nation [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“I pray you sing to the Lord a new song” It’s impossible to watch Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation today without making note of the controversy surrounding him. Emotions have run high and the first-time director has met a backlash of calls for boycott stemming from a 1999 rape case of which he was acquitted. The victim later committed suicide and his public response upon discovering this news didn’t necessarily show remorse like many believed it should. It’s tough to say now whether he was innocent of wrongdoing—look…

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