Candice Frederick

This is Us hasn’t spent a whole lot of time crafting three-dimensional arcs for its female characters, choosing instead to focus on how the myth of the male fallen hero—patriarch Jack Pearson—has been a detriment to the people who looked up to him, particularly his wife and daughter. But in this week’s episode, which reflects on the seven weeks leading up to Randall’s election night, Beth, Zoe, and Kate’s narratives both challenge the men they’ve upheld and bring attention to their own needs...

By Candice Frederick
Warning! Full SPOILERS below for the Season 3 premiere of True Detective, titled "The Great War and Modern Memory."
Let’s be real: four years ago True Detective spun right off the rails in Season 2, so much that the very thought of the anthology series returning seemed like a distant - and quite exasperating - possibility. But the premiere episode of Season 3 - titled “The Great War and Modern Memory,” directed by Jeremy Saulnier and written by series creator Nic Pizzolat...

Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times
For two decades, Russell Hornsby has been doing what he describes as “exchanging energies” with the quiet yet impactful characters he’s played onscreen — men like Lyons, the money-strapped musician in “Fences,” and Isaiah Butler, the forlorn dad mourning his son in “Seven Seconds.” It’s something that has enabled him to embody the many complexities of Maverick, the Black Panther-reciting patriarch in last year’s electrifying drama “The Hate U Give,” a...

Netflix
In Isold Uggadottir’s new film, “And Breathe Normally,” a young boy (Patrik Nokkvi Petursson) and his mother, Lara (Kristin Thora Haraldsdottir), are looking at cats in an animal shelter when he asks her, “Why do they have to live in cages?”
This innocent yet sincere question, about which he is persistent, ultimately stumps the impatient Lara but prompts both her and the audience to consider why we’ve come to accept common practices so morally unjust that even a child can detect them....

For what it’s worth, “The Upside” is exactly what you think it is: the latest Hollywood effort that aims to show that a black man and a white man with seemingly nothing in common can see past their differences and develop a mutual friendship. It’s just as pat and basic as it looks and sounds.
Maybe as we enter 2019 clinging to ideals of goodness, there is a place for a film like this that doesn’t really have a point beyond which to say that we can, in fact, all get along no matter what. That ...

Real talk: The Magicians is one of the most jam-packed series on TV and has been since it debuted in 2015. As die hard fans know, there’s always a wrench being thrown into the plans of the students at Brakebills, the home base of our core group of characters who’ve gone from young magicians-in-training to queens and kings to people who have grappled with personal conflict as they fight to save the world. To put things lightly, there’s been a whole lot going on—including fascist librarians, ev...

It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times. That’s the best way to describe Sunday night's confounding Golden Globe Awards, which patted itself on the back for its “diversity” while also reminding us that it won’t be straying too far away from the political status quo anytime soon.

It’s strange because, leading up to the ceremony—in a year when #MeToo and #TimesUp were part of the cultural zeitgeist—the Golden Globes seemed to be mildly interested in accommodating the demands of ...

TV and film critic Candice Frederick joins our studio from New York.
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The "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "Doctor Who" actress also wrote the film, in which she stars.

I've been thinking a lot about self-care in the social media age. I was struck by how director Sophia Takal explored it and confronted image-distortion & online celebrity culture in the horrifying new ep of Into The Dark.

If you’ve seen the commercials for SYFY’s new series Deadly Class, in which young misfits are trained to be assassins in a school called King’s Dominion, then you’ve probably already determined that this show is going to be ca-razy (in the best way ever).

“Welcome to Marwen” is, in a word, indescribable. But not in a good way.
Robert Zemeckis, who directed “Forrest Gump,” one of the most iconic underdog movies of all time, returns with another male protagonist with a remarkable story. But this time the filmmaker doesn’t quite seem to connect with his subject, which makes for an even greater disconnect with the audience.
Gaining empathy for a protagonist such as the one in “Marwen” shouldn’t really be an issue, though. This is, after all, the r...

If there’s one thing writer-director Adam McKay’s “Vice” does well, it’s highlight how white mediocrity has thrived in American politics and pop culture. But McKay also does this by way of making a mediocre movie about mediocre politician Dick Cheney played by a surprisingly mediocre Christian Bale. At some point, and at some level, you wish the white mediocrity could be reined in, but it never is.

The first problem with “Vice” is that it assumes its audience is in on its joke, which couldn’t...

To put it lightly, 2018 tried us. A bevy of apocalyptic headlines—from POTUS' latest tweets to the #MeToo fallout to the exhaustive daily struggle for women’s equality—threatened to completely sink our spirits. But amid each day's new disaster, a steady and powerful opposition to the film industry's status quo took shape, a resistance against the normalization of racial homogeneity, misogyny, and the oppression of voices too-long silenced.

This year gave us a black superhero paradise and the ...

There is something very fascinating about a movie that doesn’t try to appease its audience. It could go awry (like whatever is going on in “Vice”), or it could be writer-director Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux” — a pretty, messy, unapologetic indictment on pop culture that is too on-the-nose to be taken seriously, but still manages to make some actually solid points about the commercialization of the tragic celebrity.
Still, it comes off as a very expensive, mildly interesting melodrama that doesn’t...