It took only twenty-five years from the time that “Compensation,” Zeinabu irene Davis’s first fiction feature, premièred at Sundance to the time, this coming Friday, that it gets its theatrical release. Many films have languished in undue obscurity...
I consumed the nineties Black horror films of my youth largely through my fingers, spreading them just wide enough, occasionally, to put a visual to some discomforting sound. The films—“Def by Temptation” (1990), “Candyman” (1992), “Tales from the...
Whatever’s new to me is new. If you’d asked me recently whether Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Breakfast of Champions,” from 1973, had been adapted for a movie, I’d have scoffed that anyone would be foolhardy enough to try to...
There’s something almost ritualistically precise about the Hawaiian plate lunch. A scoop of pale macaroni salad, almost quietly radical in its steadfast, defiant plainness, nestles next to two scoops of white rice (it must be two, never three,...
Snowflakes provide many of us with our earliest impressions of what it means to be unique. Even within a group—the flakes so numerous as to be seemingly uncountable—no two, we were told, are exactly alike. I remember this...
Hilton AlsStaff writerIn 1971, the painter, quilter, and children’s-book author Faith Ringgold went to prison. She was not incarcerated; she went as an artist and an activist, to create a work for the Women’s House of Detention (as...
In 2016, Leah Koch and her sister Bea Hodges-Koch opened the Ripped Bodice, a romance bookstore, in Los Angeles. Since then, the genre has exploded—between 2020 and 2023, print sales jumped from eighteen to thirty-nine million copies sold....
For Bernie Krause, the sign of a healthy ecosystem is the sound it makes. The musician and Hollywood sound engineer is a pioneer of soundscape ecology, a field that uses audio recordings to better understand the natural world....
The Sundance Film Festival has long established itself as the most important showcase for American independent cinema, piping out work from bold new filmmakers into a fickle, yet potentially receptive, movie-loving world. But, for some of us, its...
