Candice Frederick

Early in 2023, you couldn’t tell folks that Magazine Dreams wasn’t going to become the talked about movie of the year.
It had just had a splashy premiere at the Sundance Film Festival that January. It stars Jonathan Majors, an actor who had then been positioned as “a young Marlon Brando,” an heir of Sidney Poitier’s legacy. He plays a socially awkward, aspiring celebrity bodybuilder often seen doing pull-ups or some other exercise in his makeshift garage gym while staring at footage of his fa...

It used to be that the only time rap songs were subject to legal action was when the FBI, police departments and suburban parents got involved. Think of the use of Young Thug’s lyrics in a 2023 RICO indictment in Atlanta, Tupac Shakur’s lyrics in a lawsuit filed by the wife of a slain white state trooper in 1992 or N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police” being the focus of a strongly worded letter from the FBI in 1989.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a Black rapper raising concern about another Black rapper...

Timothée Chalamet stars as musician Bob Dylan in "A Complete Unknown."
Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
On the heels of a massive Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in New York City, an event so popular that even the actor showed up, audiences are tasked with what is now the impossible: believing that he is a virtually obscure artist with a complex relationship with fame.
That’s what writer-director James Mangold’s new film “A Complete Unknown” banks on. In it, Chalamet portrays a 20-someth...

Scenes from "Nickel Boys" (left) and "Exhibiting Forgiveness."
Left: Amazon MGM Studios; Right: Roadside Attractions
Unless folks are doing something like recording whole scenes of a movie on their cellphones, you generally don’t notice who else is in the audience with you at a movie theater. The lights fade to black, the screen brightens and everything — and everyone — around you virtually disappears. But sometimes taking stock of how others react to a film can tell you a lot about who becom...

Peruse any streamer for Black horror films on Halloween (or any time of the year), and you might notice a good stretch of hit movies from the 1990s: “Vampire in Brooklyn,” “Tales From the Hood,” “Eve’s Bayou,” “Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight,” “Candyman” and so on. You might also realize that by the end of the decade, their success faded — until 2017’s “Get Out.”
What led to the string of releases in the first place? A number of things, according to Mikal Gaines, an assistant professor of...

Watching Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar can feel like you’ve ventured into the pit of a misinformation cesspool and are oscillating between horror, disgust, and bewilderment the entire time.

The series tells the story of real-life health influencer Belle Gibson (played by Kaitlyn Dever), the Australian sensation who in 2015 confirmed that she had faked having brain cancer and that she had cured it through alternative medicine in order to achieve celebrity status. The true story is nightmarish,...

Adrien Brody (left) and Felicity Jones in "The Brutalist."
Courtesy of A24
PARK CITY, UTAH — Like many conspicuously shifted vibes in the wake of the 2024 election and inauguration of President Donald Trump (big companies dissolving their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts; celebrities’ greater support of Republican platforms; etc.), the discourse against artificial intelligence has also seen a remarkable rollback. Prior to that about-face, there was an almost consistent resistance in Ho...

Diane Sawyer attends the Sesame Workshop 2024 Benefit Gala at Cipriani 42nd Street on May 29 in New York City.
Jamie McCarthy via Getty Images
At this phase of the doomscrolling era, chronically online folks are accustomed to catching a glimpse of news that’s even marginally concerning and reacting to it with fervor. That’s particularly true when it comes to headlines about a piece of pop culture from their childhood that might be in jeopardy. This week, it was “Sesame Street.”
Nearly a decad...

Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda in "Wicked."
Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures
By the time you finish reading this sentence, there’s a good chance that you, too, have received yet another email about the new “Wicked”-themed cocktails, or the “Wicked” line of kids’ clothing or the “Wicked” high-top sneakers. Or, lest we forget, the “Wicked” Mattel dolls that were pulled from stores due to a misprint on the packaging that directed consumers to a porn site.
Even the movie’s mar...

Actors Cooper Koch (left) and Nicholas Chavez as Erik and Lyle Menendez in a scene from "Monsters: The Lyle And Erik Menendez Story."
COURTESY OF NETFLIX
Not a day has gone by in the past several weeks that the words “Menendez brothers” haven’t appeared at the top of a social media timeline or in a news headline. It’s, well, almost like we’ve jumped into a time machine back to 1993, the year that Court TV broadcasted Lyle and Erik Menendez’s trial for the murders of their parents Kitty and Jo...

Questlove's documentary "Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)" premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
Stephen Paley
In the last few moments of “Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius),” director Ahmir Thompson, aka Questlove, shows his audience a montage of great Black artists who’ve publicly crashed and burned under the heavy gaze of Black expectation in a white Hollywood. We see images of Prince, Nina Simone, Whitney Houston, Lauryn Hill and Donna Summer. We see Will Smith...

Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni in a scene from "It Ends With Us."
Nicole Rivelli/Sony Pictures Entertainment
For most fans, the behind-the-scenes crisis PR machine that mitigates the public narratives of Hollywood talent is of very little interest. Folks hear about a celebrity controversy, scandal or misjudged statement and are rarely curious about why at some point it often just goes away — and where it ever came from to begin with.
For whatever it’s worth, that’s probably how it should be....

Scenes from "Hell's Kitchen," "Prayer from the French Republic," Doubt" and "The Wiz"
Illustration: HuffPost; Photos: Joan Marcus, Marc J Franklin, Jeremy Daniel, Getty
With the world perpetually on fire and all, audiences can sometimes gravitate more toward escapist entertainment on Broadway than the type of fare that more honestly reflects our bleak reality. But this year, gearing up to what ended up being an anticlimactic presidential election result, The Great White Way offered a plethora...

Sean Combs with Jamal Barrow at the 1998 Grammy Awards.
Arnaldo Magnani via Getty Images
Among the conspiracy theories and actual allegations against disgraced media mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, the details that have maybe been on people’s minds the longest concern the night he and then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were arrested after a 1999 nightclub shooting in New York.
That’s in part because while Combs also went on trial for the shooting, it was Jamal Barrow aka Shyne, a 19-year-old promising ...

Jeff Hiller, left, and Bridget Everett appear in a scene from the final season of "Somebody Somewhere"
Sandy Morris/HBO
April 2020 to January 2022: That was the era when TV did somewhat of a soft relaunch of the “very special episode,” a type of storyline that ran rampant on ’90s series in which writers felt compelled to add An Important Message every so often. Think of the “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” episode about Will and Carlton getting arrested despite not doing anything illegal.
In some wa...