Tony Kushner once admitted that he found the prospect of writing about Abraham Lincoln to be a daunting challenge. “The hard thing,” Kushner said, “is that Abraham Lincoln was a genius—I use that word very, very seldom—but I think that he was really one of the upper-echelon geniuses, like Shakespeare or Mozart or Michelangelo. It’s…

Well, I’m relieved. The announcement of a gender-switched version of 1999’s “She's All That” from its original screenwriter (R. Lee Fleming Jr.) had me worried it would just replicate the worst elements of the original story of a popular high school boy making a bet that he can turn a dorky art student into a…

Amber Sealey’s “No Man of God” joins a long line of films about Ted Bundy, far too many of which have fed into the mystique of the handsome, charming, brilliant sociopath, putting the serial killer on a pedestal. Her film tries to sidestep that a bit by presenting not Bundy’s crimes or attention-grabbing trial but the…

I was happy to join Gil Robertson, the President of the African American Film Critics Association (AAFCA), in presenting the 2021 AAFCA Special Achievement Impact Award to “Queen Sugar,” at the third annual AAFCA TV Honors. The TV Honor Awards recognize outstanding work in the television industry. Honorees are selected by a special committee within the African…

Tim Fehlbaum’s “The Colony” has many ideas about the future. Not all of them quite stick together but there’s a few interesting aesthetic and narrative choices to make this movie something of a curiosity. Nothing in the movie demands your full attention to understand, but there’s enough going on to capture your notice for brief…

Lil Rel Howery, Yvonne Orji, John Cena, and Meredith Hagner travel to Mexico in “Vacation Friends,” but they never really go anywhere. All four actors are trapped in one-note roles in repetitive scenarios that become increasingly tedious. It’s the same kind of raunchy comedy over and over again from director Clay Tarver, who also worked…