Arts & Culture

The Book of Henry really wants us to believe that its 12-year-old title character (Jaeden Lieberher) is the smartest kid on Earth. Well, in many ways, he is. He’s a rational, logical thinker who knows how to play the stock market. He handles his family’s finances and works on cute,…

Queen Sugar airs on OWN In her Netflix documentary The 13th, director Ava DuVernay traces the criminalization of blackness – enacted by a white power structure that ascribed violence and villainy to African-Americans – back to the Emancipation Proclamation. Motivated by political expediency and obvious projection, former slaveowners – with…

Ana Lily Amirpour’s comic post-apocalyptic action-drama offers little explanation of what exactly its “bad batch” is, or how the members of its motley, unfortunate tribe of humans wound up banished to a desert wasteland. Instead, Amirpour lets her camera linger on a sign warning that everything beyond a 10-foot-high metal…

The 2Pac biopic All Eyez on Me completes an unofficial trilogy of what we could call the Bad Boy/Death Row cinematic universe. It began with 2009’s Biggie Smalls bio Notorious and continued with NWA’s Straight Outta Compton in 2015. Too bad that, like a lot of trilogies, the third movie…

Everything you know about Tupac is likely wrong. Casual fans think of him as a loyal left coast soldier in hip-hop’s East Coast/West Coast war, but he actually had tremendous love and admiration for New York, where he was born and largely raised. Others cite his 1994 Manhattan shooting as…

The season finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race airs Friday on VH1 The world might feel like a schizophrenic hellscape where everyday you find yourself asking “Is this real life?” At least there is some comfort in knowing we still have RuPaul’s Drag Race. The Emmy award-winning drag queen reality competition…

In the opening scene of Transformers: The Last Knight, we are presented with the spectacle of King Arthur and his knights locked in an existential battle for the survival of human civilization, even though we’re not really told who they’re fighting or why. No matter, because this after all is…