Page 126 - Small Axe News Today

Rolling Stone Menu Barack Obama Reveals Favorite TV Shows, Movies of 2020 Better Call Saul, Nomadland, and By Amazon Studios; Natalie Seery/HBO; Apple + Continuing a tradition he started during his presidency, Barack Obama has once again shared his favorite TV shows and movies of the year, with the former president spending his lockdowned 2020 with Better Call Saul, The Queen’s Gambit, and acclaimed documentaries. “Like everyone else, we were stuck inside a lot this y...

A Whitney Houston Biopic Is In The Works—Heres What We Know Actress Naomi Ackie is set to play the late singer. Getty Images Actress Naomi Ackie is set to play the late Whitney Houston in an upcoming biopic, I Wanna Dance with Somebody. The British actress was chosen after an “exhaustive search for an actress who could embody Whitney Houston,” the film’s director Stella Meghie said to The Photograph, the romantic drama starring Issa Rae and LaKeith Stanfield that was re...

3 For one blissful month, it seemed like the defining moment of movie culture this year might be the most joyful one, too. Bong Joon Ho’s class warfare crowd-pleaser, Parasite, had beat the odds, shattered precedent, and overcome an American aversion to subtitles to win the Oscar for Best Picture. What a thing it was to experience live—a wonderful glitch in the simulation! Sadly, that night now feels miles away, a distant glimmer in the rearview mirror, a speck of light from the before tim...

Gif: Allison Corr Don’t trust anyone who says it’s impossible to make a best movies list in 2020. There were plenty of films to like and even love over this dark, strange, unprecedented year. Just ask the 12 contributors to The A.V. Club’s list. Each made a ranked ballot of their 15 favorites of 2020, and while there’s certainly overlap on all of them, you’ll also find passion picks sprinkled throughout: the movies that spoke, powerfully and singularly, to one critic in particular. W...

Top 10 Shows in the UK and Ireland of 2020 From a survey of national treasure Steve McQueen to the Irish premiere of Enda Bowe’s longing portraits on Belfasts ‘peace lines’, these are the years exhibition highlights No-one could have predicted how 2020 would unfold, nor how many symbols of British imperialism would fall along the way – both literally, with the toppling of monuments to slave traders, and figuratively, with the exploded myth of cultural unity, from homo...

My fellow fans of streaming content: What is television? We’ve alluded to this question several times throughout our discussion, so I thought I would circle back to it, here at the end of things. It might seem academic to most readers, who probably don’t care what stories they consume where, but for those of us who cover this field, it’s at least somewhat fraught. Advertisement The pandemic has both highlighted this question in bold yellow and underlined it four or five times for emphasis...

Romance, Christmas Mystery, Unsettling Horror and More, Now Available to Stream This week’s recommended streaming titles include Lovers Rock, Tweet Lovers Rock Well, Christmas is careening toward us like one of those Wile E. Coyote trompe l’oeil paintings on the side of a cliff. Please be careful. Make the gift that you give everyone, regardless of religious affiliation, the gift of not furthering the spread of COVID-19. Now is a very good time to give to foo...

Regé-Jean Page: ‘It takes so little imagination to include people, as opposed to how much thought and effort it takes to keep people out of these stories.’ Photograph: Joseph Sinclair Regé-Jean Page: ‘It takes so little imagination to include people, as opposed to how much thought and effort it takes to keep people out of these stories.’ Photograph: Joseph Sinclair The actor reflects on the diverse casting of the Netflix period drama, facing up to British history and h...

Michael Ward and Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn dance at a blues party in Lovers Rock, one of five films in Steve McQueens Small Axe anthology. Parisa Taghizedeh/Amazon Studios A tense courtroom, an intimate house party, a stifling police academy. These are just a few of the environments depicted in Small Axe, the ambitious new anthology film series from director Steve McQueen. The result is a collection of poignant stories buoyed by excellent performances from stars like John Boyega and L...

School can be a dangerous place for Black youth. If the teachers are primarily white, there’s a good chance they don’t know how to interact with and properly support the education of Black children. A large part of racism is based on a combination of fear and a natural inclination toward condescension. If a white teacher looks down on their Black students, they can feel it, whether it’s explicitly expressed or not. That, coupled with the white-centric nature of education in the Western wo...