Candice Frederick

To 31-year-old Karrueche Tran’s estimation, it took “five-plus years” to break away from Hollywood’s perception of her as just another pretty face. Back then, it wasn’t her undeniable talent and meme-able one-liners that fascinated the industry, but the numerous gossip headlines that constantly associated her with now-ex-boyfriend Chris Brown. She, like too many other actresses, had been defined through an unforgiving male gaze and effectively cast aside. It wasn’t until Claws, on which she p...

Lulu Wang didn't necessarily set out to make her semi-autobiographical film, The Farewell, about tragedy, even though it centers on a family grappling with the devastating truth that their matriarch is dying. Rather, the movie explores how grief and love are articulated between Asian and Asian American relatives who decide to fabricate a wedding, so they don't have to come to terms with their Nai Nai's impending death (which she doesn't even know about).
The story's told through the perspecti...

Nostalgia is one helluva drug. For instance, it can make you feel like there was actually a day when the entire United States banded together — just weeks after the Stonewall riots, and in the thick of the Vietnam War, supported by a president who would soon be on the verge of impeachment — in sheer fascination and pride over the news that a man had landed on the moon. At least, that’s the way the story goes in director David Fairhead’s new documentary, “Armstrong.”
To be honest, the idyll th...

Try as it might to seduce you with its innocuous farm setting and Kumbaya vibes, writer-director Ari Aster’s “Midsommar” is just about the coldest — and most puzzling — film to be released so far this year. And that’s not because it centers on what turns out to be a cult community with frightening ulterior motives. It’s because none of its core characters, including the female protagonist (played by Florence Pugh, “Fighting With My Family”), make any rational decisions (while being too distan...

When yet another TV spinoff is announced, it usually feels like more proof that Hollywood is as creatively bankrupt as we all feared. But then came the news of a Daria spinoff focusing on the titular animated heroine’s friend and equally complicated kindred spirit, Jodie Landon, and just like that, my confidence was restored.
My enthusiasm for Jodie isn’t fueled by nostalgia over returning to the hilariously doomed student body of Lawndale High, who are as vapid and homogenous as the houses i...

Leave it up to the great Toni Morrison to remind us of the very important lesson that black people should never look at themselves through the eyes of white people. Some might consider this obvious, but in today’s culture that lambasts the lack of diversity and representation in traditional media (i.e. white media), it bears repeating over and over. It is also the crux of the new documentary on the famed novelist, “Toni Morrison: The Pieces that I Am.”
It’s a funny thing too, because Timothy ...

If it was up to actress Niecy Nash, she wouldn’t be 25 years in the game and still have to, as she calls it, “reintroduce herself” to get better opportunities. But now that she finally has everyone’s attention with award-worthy performances in director Ava DuVernay’s series, When They See Us, and on the hit TNT show, Claws, she’s seizing the moment to show off her wide-ranging talent. That’s why she was quick to step behind the camera to direct an upcoming episode of the outrageous dramedy th...

Jessie T. Usher tries to keep Samuel L. Jackson and Richard Roundtree’s macho sexism in check in a mostly successful three-boot

To exist as women in the world today is to live in a constant state of conflict: We love and cherish a country in which we’re consistently told we’re less than; we work hard to be part of industries that elevate our male colleagues over us; we praise movies that erase our voices. We disrupt society’s course simply by having an identity that is in contention with the spaces we occupy. At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, women filmmakers brought these unique experiences to the forefront in n...

The best description of director Gene Graham’s (“The Godfather of Disco”) stripper documentary, “This One’s for the Ladies,” comes from one of the film’s subjects, naughty dancer enthusiast Michele Moore, who says, in an exasperated tone, “It’s a lot.”
That’s an understatement, because she’s referring to gyrating men who lay their penises on her head, twerk in her face, and grind up on the stage in front of an adoring crowd. It’s excessive, over-the-top, and somewhat uncomfortable, and yet sh...

It’s interesting that the first episode of director Ava DuVernay’s sprawling new miniseries, When They See Us opens with Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” The story begins in April 1989 with five Black and Latino New York City teens — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Jr., and Korey Wise — doing anything but paying attention to systemic racial injustice around them in a crack-cocaine ladened city. The teenage boys are preoccupied with trumpet solos in music class...

“Mahogany” has long been regarded as a classic romantic film that has pretty much everything you crave in the genre: sex, luxurious fashion montages, and a hot couple. But you know what stops it from being a perfect movie? The ending, which finds Diana Ross as a style maven at the top of her game giving it all up to be at her man’s (Billy Dee Williams) side as he realizes his political dreams.
It’s been more than 40 years since that film’s release, and screenwriters have only recently begun t...

The last time we saw Mars Blackmon on She’s Gotta Have It, he and his gigantic gold name chain were serenaded out of his former lover Nola Darling’s apartment to the beat of Prince’s “Raspberry Beret.” But in the second season of the Netflix series, out today, Mars has bigger things to focus on than a wounded heart. The struggling musician is bouncing from couch to couch after his sister, LuLu (Santana Caress Benitez), throws him out of her apartment because he can no longer help her pay for ...

It’s been nearly two years since Hurricane Maria ripped through Puerto Rico; devastating thousands of homes, stripping families of electricity for months, and killing nearly 3,000 people. While much time has passed, and the catastrophe has regressed from mainstream headlines, the new documentary short “After Maria” shows that there is still much work to be done, as it highlights Puerto Rican survivors who struggle to restore their lives.
There was once a time when both Puerto Rico and Flint, ...

Linda Kallerüs/Netflix
What would happen if “Back to the Future” starred black people? That’s what the filmmaker Stefon Bristol imagines in “See You Yesterday” (there’s even a winking cameo by Michael J. Fox), now on Netflix, which centers on C. J. (Eden Duncan-Smith), a high school science prodigy who builds a time-traveling backpack.
But instead of going back to the past to save her parents’ marriage, as Marty McFly did, she rewinds the previous 24 hours in hopes of preventing the murder of...