Candice Frederick

Star Trek: Discovery’s Sonequa Martin-Green continues her upward trajectory on the iconic sci-fi series
By Candice Frederick | Photography by Derek Reed | Styling by Mecca James-Williams
Sonequa Martin-Green knows what it’s like to be the “other.” One of the few faces of color to have navigated the zombie apocalypse on The Walking Dead, she’s now the first Black woman to be a lead on a Star Trek series in its 53-year history. Perhaps Martin-Green, who stars as First Officer Michael Burnham on...

Ethan Hawke (“First Reformed”) is a master at the art of playing the unassuming everyman battling life’s greatest challenges. But his latest great performance is not enough to boost writer-director Logan Marshall-Green’s (“Upgrade”) meandering new film, “Adopt a Highway,” in which he stars as an ex-convict who’s finally gained his freedom after serving a 21-year jail sentence.
Russell Millings (Hawke) is experiencing a lot of change right now. He’s got a new job at a restaurant, he’s just dis...

There’s a scene in director John Lee Hancock’s film “The Highwaymen” which chronicles the astounding multi-city hunt for the infamous criminals Bonnie Parker (Emily Probst) and Clyde Barrow (Edward Bossert) by detectives Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson), that perfectly defines the story. It’s when Frank and Maney, semi-retired rangers recruited back on the scene for the high-profile case, stop inside a quaint home where they think their targets might be only to fi...

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It has been over 20 years since the debut of “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” and even now, taking a sabbatical from life’s routine challenges is still portrayed as something only white female protagonists get to do (think Julia Roberts in “Eat Pray Love” or Reese Witherspoon in “Wild”).
According to cinema, black women are too strong and too resilient to abandon their many obligations. They don’t suddenly bus it out of the city and away from their demanding families, as does the tit...

Director Franco Rosso’s “Babylon” was never released in America. It’s a 1980 film with subtitles and no big name stars that centers on poor black male youth in London living among neighbors who shout, “Go back to your country!” from their bedroom windows on a regular basis. It’s about their daily resistance to hate and navigating a system that is rigged against them.
The characters speak in Jamaican patois, and there is no white savior. In many ways, it is the antithesis of what mainstream au...

Believe it or not, when Christina Hendricks first read the script for Joan Harris on Mad Men, her immediate reaction was, “Oh God, Joan is such a bitch.” As she tells Playboy, this thrilled the actress—“That’s super fun to play”—but she was worried that the audience was going to hate her. It’s because Joan, the head secretary of a predominantly male advertising firm in 1960s New York City, didn’t mince her words, even around the other female clerks in the office who were stuck at the bottom r...

To call Sunday night’s history-making Oscar ceremony a celebration of black girl magic would be an understatement. In fact, the multiple wins from black women across several different categories was further validation that they are not only powerful and beautiful, but their work on screen last year was among the best in the entire world.
We’ve always known this to be true, but finally — after 91 years — the Academy Awards finally got the message and gave black women the respect they deserve.
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There’s a reason why many black people are excited about Sunday’s Oscars, regardless of how often they even watch movies. It’s because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' voters have finally decided to recognize an array of amazing black talent.
It’s not just the one Viola Davis nomination every few years, or, more frequently so, the lone black male actor nominated. There’s actually a celebration of black star power across various categories. Among this new class of black Oscar n...

For more than thirty years, costume designer Ruth E. Carter has been synonymous with power, femininity, and unapologetic blackness. From the hoodies and red latex pants in the black college-set musical dramedy School Daze to Tina Turner’s black leather minidress in What’s Love Got to Do with It? to the perfectly-tailored suits worn by civil rights leaders like Coretta Scott King in Selma, Carter’s designs have always documented the aesthetic of the revolution. So it’s no surprise that her gor...

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“‘Are you OK?’ is going to be on my tombstone, with an etching of me looking concerned,” Rachel True tells me with bone-dry sarcasm. She’s elaborating on her point in director Xavier Burgin’s buzzy new documentary, Horror Noire, in which she states that black actresses in horror films like herself often play characters whose only job is to make sure the white female lead is OK. Tropes like this, and the one about black people being the first to d...

Justina Machado has spent more than two decades embodyingwildly different characters across genres: A pregnant driver who narrowly escapes Death in Final Destination 2; a hard-working nursing assistant and wife of a restorative artist in Six Feet Under; a mom on the run from a dangerous cartel in Queen of the South. But as Penelope Alvarez on One Day at a Time, she embodies multiple roles at once: A modern mother raising two politically-engaged teens in today’s divided world; a staff sergeant...

It’s hard to believe that after more than 20 years in Hollywood, Taraji P. Henson (“Hidden Figures”) is only just now headlining her first big-screen comedy, but here we are. Director Adam Shankman’s “What Men Want” is the latest in a long line of gender- and race-swapping remakes (“Ocean’s 8” and “Ghostbusters” are a few others) that Hollywood has determined to make its new cash cow.
So on the one hand, it’s great that Henson has this major vehicle that will hopefully catapult her to the sta...

The trend of capturing moments in time when one person is experiencing immense joy, and another is hitting rock bottom, while someone else entirely is being born, has always been an intriguing concept in film. It’s a way to tell stories simultaneously that emphasize the landscape in which they occur. But there’s a certain finesse that goes into making each separate vignette engaging — and in some cases, even urgent — so that these slivers of tales resonate with the audience. Unfortunately, “B...

Nestled in the heart of middle America is a town called Eureka Springs in Arkansas. You might not have ever heard of it, or maybe you passed by it on the way to someplace else. But that seems to be the point of the almost purposely hidden, quiet rural setting that operates on its own system of beliefs. Or so it appears in “The Gospel of Eureka,” a new documentary directed by Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri that takes audiences to this small section of the country to examine its homegrown po...

“All art is dangerous.” Writer/director Dan Gilroy will have you believe this after watching his quirky, literal arthouse thriller, Velvet Buzzsaw. But it’s not so much art that is perilous in the film. Rather, it’s the business of art—the buying and reselling of someone else’s personal work for the sake of commercial profit and fame—that proves to be a much more fatal risk in the new movie, which premiered on Netflix Friday. It is at once a comedic snapshot of the cutthroat art world in Los ...