When shooting the film Kindred—directed and co-written by Joe Marcantonio and available on demand Nov. 6—London native Tamara Lawrance found herself mostly alone in Ireland, shuttling between the cottage where she was staying and set. That isolation had resonances with her role in the film as Charlotte, a young woman who has made plans with her live-in boyfriend, Ben, to move to Australia, leaving behind his […]
Cassie da Costa
20 posts
Every few months on Twitter, regular people rank the Hollywood Chrises. Out of Chris Pine, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Chris Pratt, one—as they say—gotta go. Nearly every time, Wonder Woman hunk Pine easily comes out on top while Thor’s Hemsworth sluggishly follows in second place. Captain America’s Chris Evans, bless him, does not have to bring up the caboose because inevitably, it’s always Pratt, of […]
It’s always confusing when Black celebrities gather around to pontificate about what needs to be done for Black America, like rapper Ice Cube, CNN pundit Van Jones, and others did on Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk this week. In the U.S., we’re supposed to be interested in political and historical analyses by crafty capitalists rather than by those who are currently living under the failed […]
Blood on the Wall, the new film from Restrepo co-director Sebastian Junger, and co-directed by Nick Quested, is Junger’s most political yet. The film, out Sept. 30 on National Geographic, follows three groups in 2017 and 2018: a caravan of Central American migrants traveling through Mexico and hoping to make it to the U.S. where they can claim asylum in the wake of extreme violence due […]
In making sense of former Olympic and Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius’ story, particularly the February 2013 night when he shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, it’s best to assume that you’ll never arrive at a satisfying set of answers. All of the evidence in the case in which he was convicted for culpable homicide—and later, murder—in 2014 was circumstantial. No one alive knows the why […]
Matt Furie, the cartoonist and creator of the Pepe the Frog character (though crucially, not the meme), reminds me of quite a few of my male friends growing up in Eastern Pennsylvania, and even more of them now that I live in California. He’s carefree, weird in a fun way, queer-adjacent, creative, and a vessel of good vibes. It’s this personality type that draws people in: […]
The restoration of director Claire Denis’ 1999 film Beau Travail, overseen by cinematographer Agnès Godard and approved by Denis, as well as its entry into the prestigious Criterion Collection, comes at a time when non-dominant visions of the world are still largely excluded from validating institutions. We hear these words spoken again and again, but they don’t seem to sink in. As marginalized groups see their […]
In the podcast Whistleblower, which released its first episode on August 27, journalist Tim Livingston takes on a major sports scandal that has mostly been swept under the rug with a mix of savvy PR and media incentives. In 2007, former NBA referee Tim Donaghy was arrested for betting on hundreds of games, including several that he refereed himself. Donaghy was convicted and sentenced to 16 […]
What can definitively be said about the Republican National Convention’s weaponizing of Blackness and poverty to spout predictable American mythology? Trump and his cronies say again and again that he has “done the most for black people.” In fact, every U.S. government has failed and brutalized Black Americans and countless racialized people in the country and outside of it. The most significant positive change to Black […]
Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties, available on Netflix from September 9, has been met with the ire of the religious right, as well as a wider online public that believes that the film sexualizes children. To be fair, the poster Netflix initially chose to promote the French film, which won the World Cinema Directing Award at Sundance in 2019, was a grossly inappropriate choice—one that decontextualized a scene […]
Any ‘Gay and Lesbian History’ college course will dive into closeted white suburban gay male representations. In fact, this group of men, sneaking around in mid-century America, have received a fair bit of Hollywood attention in recent years. There was fashion designer Tom Ford’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s haunting novel A Single Man, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Oscar vehicle The Imitation Game, and Luca Guadagnino’s take on André […]
It’s clear enough that Ben Shapiro and Republican candidate James P. Bradley’s puritanical pearl clutching over Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s (censored!) music video “WAP,” which stands for Wet-Ass Pussy, is largely irrelevant. Shapiro’s and Bradley’s statements decrying the explicit message of the song and the (un)dress in the video constitute the kind of performative moral panics that are so baldly opportunistic as to render […]
Ramona Diaz’s latest documentary, A Thousand Cuts, stars former CNN correspondent and Rappler co-founder Maria Ressa, a formidable Filipino reporter who was born in the country yet spent much of her youth, as well as her college years, in the U.S. Ressa became famous herself when she began being targeted by the violent populist government of President Rodrigo Duterte and its online followers. The attacks have […]
Often, we discuss conspiracy theories as if they are kooky yet benign tales spun by our neighbors, acquaintances, and even friends. But in America’s current political and cultural configuration, prejudice combined with ignorance often masquerades as legitimate thought and leads to devastating outcomes (just see how Floridian COVID-19 deniers are doing now). And in a society marked by incessant high-speed information and spin, anecdotal and instinctual […]
Da 5 Bloods is, like BlacKkKlansman, another attempt by the prolifically astute Spike Lee to blend fact and fiction so to better tell the truth of our times. But with this film, streaming on Netflix now, the subject is the complex and differing experiences of four black Vietnam War vets—the eponymous Bloods—who return to the country to uncover a lost treasure as well as the remains […]
Amongst those who know, Diana Kennedy is understood to be the English-speaking world’s authority on traditional Mexican cooking. But not many people—particularly not many people outside of Mexico—know. In the documentary Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy, digitally streamable now and available on demand June 19, director Elizabeth Carroll, a foodie herself, pays close attention to the woman who has for decades evaded celebrity status while carefully and […]
In its final 20 minutes, the documentary film AKA Jane Roe delivers quite the blow to conservatives who have weaponized the story of Jane Roe herself—real name, Norma McCorvey—to argue that people with uteruses should have to carry any and all pregnancies to term. McCorvey, who died in 2017, became Jane Roe when, as a young homeless woman, she was unable to get a legal or […]
Bernie Blackout, a new VICE TV documentary directed by Pat McGee examining the mainstream media’s alleged bias against the Sanders campaign, is rooted in independent and alternative journalism instead of the corporate cable news outlets like MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN. While McGee’s film straightforwardly breaks down the cynical function of corporate media (that is, to turn a profit, not to tell the truth), the documentary […]
Remember Quibi? The mobile-optimized streaming service for attention-deficit entertainment? Well, it seems like it has finally found a niche. Sports documentaries have recently become a focal point in television programming, particularly now that docuseries are widely available via streaming. ESPN has so far been at the forefront, with its 30 for 30 series and, most recently, The Last Dance. But Quibi is making a bold entrance […]
The best of the new Netflix show The Eddy, about an eponymous jazz club and its multicultural house band in Paris, is not at all in Whiplash and La La Land director Damien Chazelle’s first two episodes (he is also an executive producer of the series, along with writer Jack Thorne and lead actor Andre Holland). Instead, the show’s brief streak of brilliance can be found […]