race issues
Kiri, Channel 4 review - transracial adoption drama muddies the watersThursday, 11 January 2018
“I’m black – I need to find out how black people live.” So reasoned Kiri, sitting in the back seat of the car driven by her social services case worker. She was on the way from her prospective adopters, a white middle-class couple who already... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: DetroitTuesday, 09 January 2018
Detroiters razed sections of their own city as surely as Rome did Carthage, during five summer days in 1967. It took, amongst others, the 101st Airborne – victors at the Battle of the Bulge, then just back from Vietnam – to crush America's worst... Read more... |
Suburbicon review - George Clooney's jarring pastiche of the American dreamThursday, 23 November 2017
If you’re hoping for an incisive look at Fifties American suburbia in this unappealing film, directed and co-written by George Clooney, you’ll be disappointed. It’s hardly worthy of the director of Good Night, and Good Luck, also set in the Fifties... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Frantz Fanon - Black Face White MaskFriday, 27 October 2017
The much-respected visual artist Isaac Julien made his name as one of the first great black British filmmakers, not least with Looking for Langston (1989) and Young Soul Rebels (1991). While Steve McQueen moved from gallery art and installations to... Read more... |
What Shadows, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh review - compelling, urgent, unashamedly provocativeThursday, 14 September 2017
You’ve got to hand it to David Greig. The artistic director of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre has shown quite a knack for surfing the zeitgeist with his programming – and more importantly, tackling urgent political issues in a properly theatrical way.He... Read more... |
'No matter where our intersections lie, we are all fundamentally connected'Tuesday, 12 September 2017
Trouble in Mind, written by Alice Childress, the black actress, playwright and novelist, first opened at New York’s Greenwich Mews Theatre in November 1955. The show made Childress the first African-American woman to win an Obie Award for an off-... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: My Beautiful LaundretteThursday, 31 August 2017
This rerelease of Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette comes as part of the wider BFI programme marking the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, and its presence in that strand, as one of the foremost works of its time... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Daughters of the DustTuesday, 04 July 2017
Julie Dash’s remarkable 1991 film tells the story of the Peazant family, the descendants of freed slaves who live on the Georgia Sea Islands, an isolated community on the South-Eastern seaboard of the USA, more in touch with African traditions than... Read more... |
Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, Wyndham's Theatre review – searing stuffWednesday, 28 June 2017
Broadway so frequently fetes its visiting Brits that it's nice when the honour is repaid. That said, it's difficult to imagine audiences anywhere remaining unmoved by Audra McDonald's occupancy – "performance" seems too mundane a word – of the... Read more... |
An Octoroon review - slavery reprised as melodrama in a vibrantly theatrical showSaturday, 27 May 2017
Make no mistake about it, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright to watch. London receives its first opportunity to appraise his vibrant, quizzical talent with this production of An Octoroon, for which he received an OBIE in 2014 (jointly with his... Read more... |
No Dogs, No Indians, Brighton Festival review – poor production shoulders too big a taskFriday, 19 May 2017
A whacking great story has gone largely untold in British theatre: the legacy of colonialism in India, including the cultural ghosts the British left behind. With the 70th anniversary of Indian independence just round the corner this summer, poet... Read more... |
I Am Not Your Negro, review - 'powerful portrait of James Baldwin'Saturday, 08 April 2017
The Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro is a chronicle of the pioneering writer and Civil Rights activist James Baldwin. Its director Raoul Peck mirrors the intellectual challenge that Baldwin set his audience: the film demands that you... Read more... |
