Candice Frederick

Merritt Wever and Toni Collette are not big fans of true crime. But if you’ve seen Wever’s work in films like Charlie Says, in which she plays a criminologist who helps the women of the Manson Family understand their accountability, or Hereditary, in which Collette is a mother grappling with grief and mental illness, you know that empathy is at the root of all their performances. And it’s what led them to take part in the new Netflix series Unbelievable.
Inspired by the real-life events docum...

School spelling bees have often been fodder for documentaries — young people trying to control their sweaty palms, navigate the overwhelming pressure of academic competition, and, if they’re lucky, develop a sense of self along the way. But many of these films, like “Bee Nation” or “Spellbound,” perpetuate a racially monolithic desire to succeed that often excludes black and Latinx adolescents. That’s what makes “Don’t Be Nice” such an interesting watch.
The debut feature from director Max Po...

If you could sum up Hustlers in one scene, it would be Jennifer Lopez writhing around a stripper pole in a gold thong bikini, caressing herself with dollar bills flung from a salivating male audience. It represents confidence, pleasure, money—all things each character in this bawdy drama crave. It’s no wonder, then, that when Ramona leaves the stage clutching her windfall to her bosom, she whispers to newcomer Destiny (Constance Wu), “Doesn’t money make you horny?”
It’s not just the fantasy o...

Perhaps it's kismet that Keke Palmer is in a movie called Hustlers. For the past 15 years, the 26-year-old has created spaces for herself in an industry that hasn't been known to just hand opportunities to young black women. Since her film debut in 2004 as Queen Latifah’s niece in Barbershop 2: Back in Business, Palmer has gone on to share the big and small screens with Hollywood heavyweights like Angela Bassett and Jamie Lee Curtis, catapult her music career with bops like “Hands Free,” writ...

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The whole country is a strip club, according to Jennifer Lopez’s swindling erotic dancer character Ramona in “Hustlers.”
On the surface, writer/director Lorene Scarafia’s new film, in theaters Friday, looks like a straight man’s fever dream. There are scantily clad, enviably flexible women slithering down nightclub poles and grinding on the laps of handsy Wall Streeters showering them with dollar bills. But if you look beyond it...

After more than 20 years in Hollywood, Sanaa Lathan is no stranger to playing romantic leads whose relationships are...complicated. Like Robin in The Best Man, Monica in Love & Basketball, and Michelle in Nip/Tuck, one of Lathan's specialities was playing black women who struggled to define themselves within the confines of a white, patriarchal system.
Lathan was so good at it that, in fact, that according to the actress, she had a reputation for being “stuck up.” But that’s what most attract...

Is there a road map to becoming an antiracist? According to Ibram X Kendi, the bestselling author of the newly released book How to be an Antiracist, it’s not as simple as describing yourself as “not racist”.
Who was your target audience for this book?
IK: The target audience is really people who are willing to open themselves up to changing themselves and society, or people who are already doing that. That group includes people of different races, genders, and ideologies. I really want to sp...

Is Brad Pitt’s character in “Ad Astra” a sociopath? That is the nagging question after watching director and co-writer James Gray’s remarkably stylish and fascinating space drama, which follows astronaut Roy McBride (Pitt) on a mysterious trek to the edge of the solar system to find his estranged father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones).
At its core, “Ad Astra” is a family saga about a man grappling with the person he’s become by way of an increasingly intense desire to reconnect with his astronaut...

As long as you’re alive, you can change things. That’s what Uncle Jack (David Oyelowo) insists to his niece Ashley (Storm Reid) in the new sci-fi film, “Don’t Let Go.” In the film, which is in theaters Friday, Ashley is preserved from an earlier timeline — one before she, her mom (Shinelle Azoroh) and her dad (Brian Tyree Henry) were murdered. This theme of hope and perseverance can be traced back to Octavia Butler’s 1993 science fiction novel, “Parable of the Sower.”
“That’s all anybody can ...

The new documentary is peak tragedy porn.

A conversation about The Hunt's cancellation, censorship, and how we react to controversial films moving forward

One of the most horrifying moments in “The Nightingale” is when a young Irish woman (Aisling Franciosi) is raped by several men, who then murder her husband (Michael Sheasby) and infant right in front of her. It’s a brutal scene and grips audiences with rage and an overwhelming agony — feelings all too familiar in today’s news cycle.
From the abortion bans to the mass shootings to the sudden deaths of beloved celebrities, it see...

Amid depressing news these days like abortion bans, mass shootings, and rampant Hollywood sexual assault cases, it can be easy to overlook an event so uplifting that it almost sounds like science fiction. Just a few days ago gymnast Simone Biles, who already defied all laws of gravity when she became the most decorated female athlete at the 2016 Rio Olympics (tying with US swimmer Katie Ledecky), nailed the riskiest balance beam dismount in the sport’s history at the US national championships...

It seems like every time the subject of gender parity in Hollywood comes up, the conversation immediately becomes about sharing and dissecting the dismal stats we’ve already seen countless times before. Those include: only 11 women of color had lead roles in films last year, and only one female filmmaker (Kathryn Bigelow, “The Hurt Locker”) has ever won a Best Director Oscar. Not to mention, 92% of directors of 2018’s top-grossing domestic releases were male, even though 2017 proved that the ...

Perhaps the worst thing a film can be, even more so than the binary of good or bad, is forgettable. That is the best way to reflect upon “Brian Banks,” the latest film in the canon of dramas that highlight the criminalization and mass incarceration of black people in the United States.
Director Tom Shadyac (“The Nutty Professor”) flatly tells the true story of the titular football star (Aldis Hodge, “City on a Hill”) whose promising career came to a screeching halt when he was wrongfully accu...