Lovers of contemporary mainstream film fall into two camps: Those who, like me, love Christopher Nolan’s work, and those who are routinely irritated by the British-American director’s movies.

I’ve always been less impressed with Nolan’s trademark grand scale. Yes, “The Dark Knight” trilogy and “Dunkirk” are sumptuous indulgences, but “Oppenheimer” was an over-hyped bore.

One man’s opinion.

I’m far more fascinated by Nolan’s mind- and world-bending explorations of time, e.g. “Memento,” “Inception,” “Interstellar,” “Tenant.” Considering the collapse of inner and outer space in those films, “The Odyssey” is a relatively conventional and linear piece of Nolan filmmaking, even when much of its story moves backwards through intermittent retrospection.

The built-in cunning of “The Odyssey’s” cinematic achievement is that its over-sized proportions are wholly justified by its literary source material: Homer’s “The Odyssey”, the ancient Greek, 24 book, epic poem that many of us loved to hate in high school. “The Odyssey” follows the twenty-year-long sojourn of Odysseus, the king of Ithaca. In Homer’s poem, Odysseus leaves his wife, Penelope, and young son, Temelacus, to wage a ten-year war in Troy, only to be waylaid for another ten years in his return home by legions of ornery creatures, conspiratorial gods, the annihilation of his men, and the affections of the sea nymph, Calypso.

And then there are those 108 suitors that Odysseus finds thrashing about in his house with conquering designs on Penelope and his throne. How’s that for a homecoming?

Not only does Homer’s poem sweep across global land and sea and decades of high-body count warfare and assault, but it enlists gods and monsters to bring moral clarity to humankind’s frailty. To that end, the most fitting modern vehicle for “The Odyssey” would be a “Game of Thrones”-level mini-series, or a “Dune” or “Lord of the Rings”-like trilogy. Although Nolan is fairly faithful to the original text, some of Homer’s juiciest plot points and themes are given short shrift or are lost all together in service of a roughly three-hour theatrical release. Either way, to spare any expense or excess in bringing the likes of the Trojan War, the land of Hades, Sirens, Cyclops, and Zeus’ high jinks to the big screen would itself be an epic fail.

Clearly, Nolan got that studio memo. Or maybe he wrote it. “The Odyssey” is a no holds barred, audio-visual siege on our nervous systems. Shot entirely with IMAX film and sporting a half billion dollar production and marketing budget, “The Odyssey” demands to be experienced in an IMAX theater, or in a comparably enhanced big screen movie house, where it promises to give new sensory meaning to the term full battle rattle.

In keeping with its blockbuster mandate, Nolan populates the screen with some of Hollywood’s biggest names. My initial fear was that the rather vanilla Matt Damon was badly miscast as the wily, giant-among-men Odyssesus, but that concern eventually gave way to an appreciation for Damon’s layered, sober performance and his battle-worn visage and physique. The sea weariness and detachment from humanity that Damon’s Odyssesus holds are so visceral that they serve to make us painfully anxious for Odysseus’ labored return to Ithaca.

Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland portray Penolope and Temelacus; Zendaya skulks about as the goddess Athena; Lupita Nyong’o does double duty as sisters, Helen and Clytemnestra; Robert Pattinson plays the creepiest of plotting suitors, Antinous, and Charlize Theron is the literally intoxicating Calypso. Few of these marquee players make us fully forget their individual star personas, but their performances are nonetheless effective, and at moments, powerful, especially when Hathaway and Pattison are on screen.

Himesh Patel as Odyssesus’ first mate, Eurylochus, Elliot Page as the soldier Sinon, and a mostly masked Benny Safdie are unburdened by their less-familiar faces and, as a result, work harder to be more memorable. Nolan smartly avoids demanding that his cast put on British accents as a way of denoting antiquity, but the use of some modern day informalities, like “dad,” is a bit distracting.

While Nolan treats us to some wonderfully rendered monsters, he is surprisingly restrained in his reliance on supernatural elements. In particular, the gods are high profile, fully personified antagonists in Homer’s poem, but, with Nolan, the likes of Helios, Poseidon and Zeus hover unseen and unverified beyond the onscreen action. The otherworldly pleasure of “The Odyssey” is found less in the pantheon of gods than in the surreality of images: A naked giant with a face conceived by Picasso; entranced soldiers voraciously slurping their way through mounds of slop; ghosts intoning from the mud.

What actually makes “The Odyssey” so magical, is that for all its Hollywood spectacle, it doesn’t sacrifice Homer’s lyricism. Odysseus’ introspection about violating “Zeus’ law” and his remorse for the murder, rape and pillage left in his wake, come 19 years too late, but it’s a grounding mediation on what might otherwise get mistaken for the glory of war. Even the film’s Tarantino-esqe climax somehow avoids, at least by today’s standards, feeling gratuitously violent and manages to capture the gratifying mayhem I imagined when I first read “The Odyssey” (or at least the CliffsNotes) as a teenager.

Like the oral histories that animate Homer’s poem, “The Odyssey” is a triumph in storytelling, with haunting narrations and cinematic flourishes coming together to carry us on an adventure that builds momentum with every frame. With Nolan’s telling, however, be advised to keep some earplugs close.

This article appears in the July 23, 2026 edition of the New York Amsterdam News and is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

To understand what my favorite band of all time meant to me, read my high school yearbook quote. When I needed to make sense of that time in my life, when I needed to invoke scriptures that stirred something inside me, I turned to the words of the holy Earth, Wind and Fire, the Book of “Shining Star”:

Born a manchild of the sun

Saw my work had just begun

Saw I had to stand alone

Bless it now I’ve got my own.

As I grew into an adult, I watched EWF’s impact and legacy fade. Many of our greatest pop icons — Michael, Beyonce, The Beatles, Elvis, Bob Marley, etc — live large in documentaries, “Behind the Music”-like treatments, and endless tributes, but EWF has received an insufficient amount of that love.

At least until now. The beauty of Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is that he takes artists who often get relegated by white taste-makers to a Black music subcategory, and restores them to their rightful place at the foundational center of American music craft and culture. Thompson’s Academy Award-winning “Summer of Soul,” his “Sly Lives,” which profiled Sly Stone, and now his latest, “Earth, Wind & Fire: To Be Celestial vs. That’s The Weight Of The World,” all take on the grinding task of naming a new American Songbook for the second half of the 20th century. And while the film shows that the magic of EWF has always been a product of collaboration, Thompson dramatizes the extent to which its founder and leader, the late Maurice White, is the axis about which EWF rotated.

“Earth, Wind and Fire” is just as much a love letter to the EWF faithful as it is documentation for the masses. Its intimacy comes from its close collaboration with surviving band members, access to archival footage, and Thompson’s off-camera reactions, not to mention the film’s inventive use of vibrant animation and graphics to fill in visual storytelling gaps. Its poignancy comes from its ability to translate on screen the joy, soulful immediacy, and imagination that EWF’s music communicated to a generation yearning for deeper meaning on their radio dial.

The film starts with Maurice White’s early childhood as a drummer in Memphis and chronologically traces his jazz music scene evolutions in Chicago, and pop refinements in L.A. In doing so, the film highlights the bands White contributed to, like the Ramsey Lewis Trio, and the different iterations of EWF that he founded and led. It also explores the idiosyncrasies that informed his leadership of EWF, like his solitary nature, his restless, mostly Jesus-free, spiritual cravings, and his fascination with afrofuturism.

The film’s interviewees include key members of his bands, like White’s brother, the bassist Verdine White, lead vocalist and renowned falsetto Philip Bailey, and drummer Ralph Johnson; past managers, handlers and producers; as well as his life partner, Marilyn White and two of his children. In order to demonstrate the impact that EWF had on generations of musicians, we hear from Stevie Wonder, Lionel Ritchie, James “Jimmy Jam” Harris III, H.E.R., and Anderson .Paak. Thompson also indulges in some gratuitous celebrity flex by including Barack and Michelle Obama in the interview mix. The Obamas are delightful presences on screen, but offer little beyond surface-level fan insight and soundbites.

As the film tells the story of EWF, some clichés are unavoidable. Maurice White propels the familiar man-starts-band, man-loses-band, man-reunites-with-band trajectory that frames the film. We’re on hand when EWF sells millions of records and wins Grammys before eventually failing to keep pace with the changes in American musical tastes and cultural sensibilities. EWF helped give life to the funk-rich, spiritual meaning-making of the seventies, but it was ultimately buried by the disco infused, synthesizer-dominated, me-ness of the eighties.

It’s notable that the one music industry trope White and EWF seem to avoid is the drug- and alcohol-soaked addiction story. And, owing to the fact that EWF did such an efficient job of keeping their drama and backstories out of the public eye, much of the film was quite revelatory. For all the peace and harmony White projected on stage and in his music, we learn that he could be a heartless “chickensh*t” who pathologically avoided confrontation. White was an indisputably brilliant songwriter, producer, and builder of epic orchestral bands, but he was also a lousy businessman, a narcissist, and a chronic and unrepentant philanderer. The film does its best to explain these shortcomings by psychoanalyzing White’s abandonment as a child.

For all of its behind-the-scenes value, the film benefits the most from the fact that Thompson is a musician who appreciates White’s artistry because he understands what it takes to create it. For example, Thompson’s mind is blown when he learns that Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” was inspired by “Shining Star.” We come to learn the funk contributions of guitarist Al McKay, White’s mentorship of his young bandmembers, and how the band never fully recovered its mojo after the death of arranger Charles Stepney. We are brought into the arrangements and production elements of masterpiece albums like “Open Our Eye,” “That’s the Way of the World,” and “Spirit.” For all the stagecraft, concert magic, costumes, and choreography that electrified their concerts and album covers, none of it quite equaled EWF’s musicianship.

For those of us who followed EWF’s heyday in real time, the film helped connect dots. We witness the industry and financial pressures that dragged White into watered down crossover. We get a clearer understanding of why, after the album “I Am,” White begins to abandon the elements that made EWF so special, namely its spirituality, its rootedness in gospel, free jazz and African rhythms, and its inventiveness.

Some of the film’s other nuggets include the story of how George Clinton jolted EWF into a dedication to deep funk, and lead vocalist Philip Bailey’s finally copping to what I’ve known all along: The seemingly romantic slow jam “Reasons” is actually a guilt-filled meditation on a one-night stand.

Thompson ends the film with a nod to the universality of EWF’s music and a celebration of its biggest-selling song, “September.” This sequence is an uplifting vision of inclusion that shows people of all races and generations dancing to and mouthing the words to the 1978 song. The impulse to end on such a feel-good note is understandable. But like “Boogie Wonderland,” “September” was co-written by Allee Willis and was a 1970s harbinger of EWF”s gradual 1980s descent into pop genericism. Willis, along with other outside contributors like David Foster who was derisively referred to as “that white boy” by disenchanted band members in the film, didn’t share the musical groundings of the band, but were enlisted by White to write and produce new EWF music. This sound introduced into EWF’s repertoire in the late seventies and eighties was designed to broaden their appeal at the expense of a more soulfully resonant message, one that had always been coded with a wide variety of African-descended music traditions. In doing so, White forever disconnected EWF from its original fan base. And by ending the film with “September,” Thompson undermines perhaps the film’s keenest observation, that EWF reached its greatest success when it, as Jimmy Jam puts it, “embraced [the idea] that music can have a higher purpose.”

This article appears in the June 18, 2026 edition of the New York Amsterdam News and is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

The moment reverberated loudly through the storied political corridors of Central Brooklyn. For Cumbo and other Black long-established political leaders who claim Black Brooklyn as their turf, the protest amounted to an invasion, an act of anti-Blackness meant to intimidate Cumbo, and a warning shot across the bow of the reigning political order. Although Brisport and Forrest are themselves Black and long-time Brooklyn residents, those in their contingent, according to press accounts at the time, were not just mostly white, but new to the neighborhood. So at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, here were people reported to be white gentrifiers making demands on a Brooklyn-born Black elected official.

Cumbo was having none of it. A week after the rally, she led a contingent of her Black supporters, including Velmanette Montgomery, the long-time incumbent retiring from the state senate seat Brisport was vying for, on a counter demonstration to Brisport’s house where press accounts reported that Kirsten Foy, a former regional director for Al Sharpton’s organization, the National Action Network, hurled the epithets “coon” and the “n” word, referring to Brisport. In Foy’s eyes, Brisport, whom Cumbo publicly tagged as the ring leader, represented “the reason Harriet [Tubman] carried a gun…Because only someone with that character would bring a white lynch mob, and that’s what it was, a white lynch mob, to a Black queen’s home to terrorize her and to terrorize her child.”

Brisport and Forrest, now a sitting state senator and state assembly member respectively, told me recently that they felt that the blowback they received from Cumbo and her allies was exaggerated and that they exploited the incident to score political points. “[Prior to that], there were pretty regular protests outside the home of [U.S. Senator] Chuck Schumer, which I believe is what inspired organizers to go to Cumbo’s home,” Brisport explained.“This was during COVID and organizers felt they couldn’t go to her office. It was pretty respectful outside of her apartment. I’m pretty sure I said, ‘thank you’” to Cumbo for her service on the City Council.

Heated Rivalry

Almost six years later to the day, the New York State Democratic Primary will represent the latest and possibly most defining chapter in this conflict. On June 23rd, a number of competitive races in the deep-blue districts of Central Brooklyn will feature face offs between these rival formations.

On one side of the ledger is the legendary Black Democratic club Vanguard Independent Democratic Association, widely known as VIDA, which represents a voter constituency that identifies with a fifty-year legacy in Central Brooklyn. Candidates affiliated with VIDA tend to focus their campaigns on the delivery of vital services, improving education and supporting seniors. And in a nod to the oversized influence of homeowners in Central Brooklyn - even though the vast majority, 78 percent, of Bedford-Stuyvesant residents are renters - fighting deed theft has become a signature issue.

On the other side is the Central Brooklyn contingent of the Democratic Socialist of America, an activist organization designed to “fight for reforms that empower working people.” DSA is the largest socialist group in the nation and the Central Brooklyn branch of the New York chapter is the political home to a membership that is largely white, relatively new to the neighborhood, and mostly under the age of forty. According to DSA’s website, the DSA is running 10 insurgent candidates in New York City this primary season. Half of these candidates are Black or Brown candidates, most with little to no electoral experience, running against Black or Brown Democratic establishment candidates in rapidly changing districts. All but one is under 40. DSA-endorsed incumbents and insurgents across the country almost uniformly emphasize “universalist” principles: Protecting the rights of tenants, taxing the rich, and providing universal child care, while highlighting that they take no money from corporations, the real estate lobby or any outside interests.

DSA’s 38-year-old Jabari Brisport, who defeated former New York State Assembly Member and establishment candidate Tremaine Wright in a shocker in 2020 to become state senator for the 25th Senate District, is being challenged by Marlon Rice, a 51-year-old who has focused his career on community-based work in Central Brooklyn, and is backed by VIDA. At a recent debate, Rice interpreted any policy deemed hostile to homeowners—like Mamdani’s flirtation with a reduction in the state’s estate tax threshold—as an attack on Central Brooklyn’s long-standing Black population. And in the overlapping New York State 56th Assembly District, the 61-year-old incumbent and VIDA candidate, Stefani Zinerman, is being challenged by DSA’s Eon Huntley, 41-year-old PTA president and fashion retail specialist who barely lost to Zinerman in 2024. (A third candidate, Michael Bailey, is also on the ballot.) The Primary also features races in which DSA-affiliated and VIDA candidates are vying to represent Democratic Party voters at the county and state levels as District Leaders.

Although local, these races have attracted state-wide and even national attention. At stake is the political and narrative control of one of the nation’s largest and most iconic clusters of neighborhoods with historically substantial concentrations of Black residents – starting from Fort Greene and moving east through Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Ocean Hill and Brownsville and then south into East Flatbush–– known as Central Brooklyn. Prominent Black elected officials including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies, Rep. Yvette Clarke, New York Attorney General Tish James and NYC Public Advocate Jumaane Willisams have lined up for the VIDA candidates, while Mayor Mamdani, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Rep. Jamal Bowman have endorsed the DSA candidates.

New Blood

Tiffanie Burt, VIDA’s current president, does not fit the VIDA-member archetype of the 45-year-old-plus, homeowning, long-standing Bedford-Stuyvesant resident. The 38-year-old transplant from Cincinnati arrived in New York in 2013 and lived in Harlem before eventually settling in an apartment that she rents in Bed-Stuy in 2018.

But Burt might just be the new blood that VIDA needs at this moment. As a Democratic political club rooted in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, VIDA’s battle against obsolescence reflects the existential threat experienced by the surrounding historically Black population that has helped define New York since the 1830s. Bed-Stuy has been transformed by an exodus of Black homeowners and renters, some of whom have cashed out of their wildly appreciated homes to go live in more retirement-friendly cities like Atlanta and Durham. Others have been forcibly pushed out by predatory lending and title transfer practices and rising unaffordability.

As these Black folks left, families and young single people moved in, eager to gain a foothold in an area known for its Victorian brownstones, tree-lined blocks, cultural vibrancy and a profound sense of community. According to the Furman Center, Bed-Stuy was 75 percent Black in 2000; by 2024 that share had dropped to 38 percent. In 2000, households making under $20,000 per year represented the largest share of households (30.4 percent). By 2024, households making between $100,000 and $250,000 represented the largest share of households (31.4 percent), and households with children 18 years and younger dropped from 45 percent to 20 percent.

With family connections to the Bronx, Burt represents one of the relatively few young Black professionals who have managed to repatriate to New York in recent years. “I went to school at City College for my master’s. I graduated, turned 30, and moved to Brooklyn, all in the same month,” described Burt. “I was honestly just looking for a safe haven. I knew somebody who knew someone else. And that’s what brought me here.”

Burt’s communications background and civic interests led to her involvement in judiciary campaigns supported by VIDA, where she quickly rose to leadership. VIDA is one of hundreds of neighborhood improvement organizations – economic and housing development corporations, block associations, churches, cultural centers, and political formations – in Bed-Stuy that enabled this neighborhood to become a stable community for Black working- and middle-class folks. But with the decline of the Black population, the glory days of those institutions are behind them. Burt, with her millennial and first-generation Bed-Stuy sensibilities, paired with her personal investment in other Bed-Stuy legacy institutions, like Mount Lebanon Baptist Church and Community Board 3, is the personified bridge between the old Bed-Stuy and the new.

For Burt, her connection to VIDA enables her to feel rooted in her community. “A lot of us are not paying attention. They’re taking away our reproductive and voting rights. We’re losing our voice.” Burt told me that she has been mentored by VIDA members who are Generation X, Baby Boomers, and pre-Baby Boomers. “As a transplant from Ohio, I get family, people who defend me, a body of elders and a sense of belonging,” she said.

The Vanguard

You can’t understand the “new” Bed-Stuy without knowing its history. Starting with the 1975 election of Al Vann, who grew to public prominence as the leader of a movement for Black community control of schools in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, a young generation of left-leaning local Black activists and civic leaders, steeped in the tradition of the civil rights and Black power movements, began to challenge the white political structure in their own backyards. By the late seventies and early eighties they began mounting successful campaigns for city, state and federal offices against the formidable Brooklyn Democratic Party machine. As newly elected officials, savvy field organizers and brilliant legal strategists, figures like Major Owens, Ed Towns, Roger Green, Annette Robinson, Velmanette Montgomery, Clarence Norman Jr., Thomas and Frank Boyland, John Flateau, Esmeralda Simmons and Paul Wooten became identified with this new insurgent energy.

Vann consolidated power in Bed-Stuy through the creation of his own political club, VIDA. But he was also the central figure in organizing this new guard of Black elected officials and their operatives into a loose federation called the Coalition for Community Empowerment.

For most of the eighties, nineties and early aughts, VIDA and the Coalition for Community Empowerment (CCE), dominated the political ecosystem in Central Brooklyn by directing public money into local organizations and institutions, establishing patronage mills, coordinating field operations for campaigns, and gatekeeping political candidacies. CCE not only successfully broke the hold that the powerful Brooklyn Democratic party machine had on Central Brooklyn, but it went on to replace it with its own machine, form one of the largest concentrations of Black elected officials in the nation, and expand voting rights in New York City.

Vann, VIDA and CCE also went on to claim a rich legacy. Vann represented Bed-Stuy in the New York State Assembly and then the New York City Council continuously for almost 40 years and helped steward Central Brooklyn’s rise into one of most important Democratic voting blocks in the state. He and the members of CCE are credited with founding community anchor institutions, including the Center for Law and Social Justice and Medgar Evers College. The journalist Ron Howell recounted that, in the early eighties, the CCE legal team “filed a series of lawsuits arguing that district lines should be redrawn to allow for more minority representation. One of the suits went to the U.S. Supreme Court and was decided in their favor. All together, the actions resulted in the creation of a dozen new minority legislative seats in New York state.”

The peak of VIDA and CCE’s ambitions came in the mid eighties when they unsuccessfully tried to run Herman Badillo for mayor and Vann himself unsuccessfully ran for Brooklyn Borough President. But slowly, in a story as old as politics itself, the upstarts who initially challenged the political establishment, became the palace guards for the establishment itself. VIDA, an organization once known for aggressive field operations and street campaigns, began to rely on the name recognition of incumbency. And even some of its founding leaders now admit that they held on too long before handing leadership over to a new generation— without updating its mission and social change strategies to fit a new era of politics. Esmeralda Simmons, the founding Executive Director of the Center for Law and Social Justice, marks the moment the Coalition for Community Empowerment completed its transition from insurgency to establishment when Coalition member Assemblyman Clarence Norman, Jr., became the Democratic Party boss in Kings County in 1990. By 1997, the local newsmagazine City Limits published a piece entitled “Al Vann and the Revolution. Unplugged” that lamented that “Vann has left behind the revolutionary rhetoric. He speaks more about business enterprises as Bed-Stuy’s salvation, and focuses his attention on finessing contracts and grants for organizations and businesses in his home turf.”

CCE faded away once the founding generation of elected officials retired. VIDA proudly continues to support candidates, assign poll workers, run field operations, give out awards to local leaders and organize community programs. Burt says it maintains a modest but active membership of over 150 people. Simmons regrets that younger political activists aren’t more aware of CCE and VIDA’s roots. “The old guard had a presumption that everybody knew what VIDA was, and we handed it over to younger people and didn’t give them any direction or didn’t tell them any history,” says Simmons. “There was very little political education about Pan-Africanism and the whole radical side of VIDA. That’s on us.”

The New Insurgents

Like Tiffanie Burt, Maya Meredith came to New York for college and then stayed—first in Crown Heights, then in Clinton Hill and now in Bed-Stuy. Meredith, now a leader in DSA’s New York City Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus, grew up in mostly white, suburban neighborhoods in Massachusetts and Florida.

As a Black DSA member, Meredith is no stranger to the political group’s internal struggles with questions of race. The “left has been inside of arguments about class reductionism versus identity politics for like 100 years,” she told me, and DSA is no exception. She sees herself as working to help DSA evolve. In a candid 2024 self-published article, Meredith revealed that inside DSA the perspectives of people of color within the organization are often marginalized. NYC-DSA has struggled “to recruit and retain working class people of color because we’ve failed to build trust with these communities,” she wrote.

Despite this, Meredith finds that DSA offers opportunities for young people of color to be involved in electoral politics that she argues exist in few other places. When I asked her what drew her to DSA, she cited a unique blend of ideological grounding, a commitment to political education, and an infrastructure that allows DSA members to have real impact along a wide range of issues and campaigns. And because it is a highly functioning democracy that is self-funded and remarkably responsive to its base, even a minority voice can eventually be heard.

Meredith is living proof of that. She was part of a team that drafted and won adoption by DSA of the “Socialism is the People” resolution that was presented at DSA’S City Convention. The proposal calls for the creation of “‘community solidarity committees’ within each branch that map the community-based organizations in our neighborhoods, build relationships with them, and develop opportunities for collaboration and partnership.”

Still, Meredith admits that it stings when critics refer to DSA as “colonizers” and Black DSA candidates as “puppets.” Ironically, it’s a criticism reminiscent of the one that Black Democrats level at the Republican Party and Black Republican candidates for office. DSA candidates are often grassroots organizers in their own right – PTA presidents, tenant leaders and community organizers. But without a membership pipeline that is, in Meredith’s words, successfully recruiting and retaining working class people of color in their organization, Black candidates that are drafted from DSA’s mostly white ranks will inevitably be set up, rightly or wrongly, to face the accusation that they are being tokenized.

DSA functions as an alternative to mainstream political machinery that is often rife with conflicted interests. Instead of cycling through election day patronage assignments, working for a non profit funded with political earmarks, or serving on the host committees for events for veteran incumbents, DSAs members cut their teeth on groundswell movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter and the high energy, low-dollar-donor campaigns of Bernie, AOC and Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Although DSA organizes issue-oriented campaigns, it also prioritizes pragmatic electoral campaigns that are built to win, not just wave an ideological flag. So as demographic shifts took shape, DSA’s interest in Central Brooklyn in recent years became inevitable. NYC DSA, DSA’s biggest chapter, has been around since the birth of National DSA in 1982, but it has since experienced two pivotal growth spurts: One in 2016 when Bernie’s candidacy and Trump’s win gave DSA national exposure and shocked people into action. The second was the Zohran Mamdami campaign, which inspired the new voter base growing in Central Brooklyn.

According to Austin Dilley, the branch representative for Central Brooklyn DSA and Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest’s campaign manager, New York’s DSA has approximately 14,400 dues paying members, about 4,000 of whom are in Central Brooklyn—making Central Brooklyn NYC DSA’s largest branch. These are not passive card carriers, but a highly activated, vast reservoir of volunteers who flood the zone with social media, knock on doors and animate campaigns at every administrative and mobilization level.

Epilogue as Prologue

At a time when the Trump administration and its MAGA supporters are systematically seeking to dismantle the legacy of the civil rights movement, it feels particularly important for political organizers to understand the modes of struggle that brought Black people this far. When I’ve talked to DSA organizers for this story, most were familiar with names like Al Vann and Annette Robinson, but they knew very little about the Coalition for Community Empowerment, the history of VIDA and the ways these formations made DSA’s own electoral victories possible. Few people of any stripe under the age of 40 in Central Brooklyn can speak to these strategies and history.

As far apart as they are on issues like taxes, renters vs. homeowners, and the value of capitalism, DSA and VIDA share more than they might admit to. DSA and VIDA have each thrived because they have managed to connect and enfranchise their constituencies through a sense of purpose and community and the building of effective political apparatuses. DSA’s disciplined campaign field ethic and spirit of radicalism, though it may lack a robust race analysis and doesn’t define itself around Black self-determination, resembles VIDA’s earlier days.

It’s not surprising that some local community members are turned off by insurgent Black candidates seeking the endorsement of a political group with a mostly white membership, but that process is arguably more democratic than the crony systems that party machines often use to determine who is worthy of running for office. And if DSA is indeed a midwife to Central Brooklyn gentrification by building power among white newcomers, the Black political establishment in Central Brooklyn was gentrification’s deadbeat dad. Not only did high housing costs and displacement happen on the watch of the CCE generation and their heirs, but many among them received over the years campaign contributions from the real estate industry and developers. One long-time City Council representative and Democratic Party official in Central Brooklyn, Darlene Mealy, has not only received thousands in real estate and special interests dollars, but her relatives have also been accused of running a deed theft ring in Harlem.

The big question is, does this phenomenon exist beyond Central Brooklyn and what does it say about American urban politics?

When I asked DSA national co-chair Ashik Siddique if Black DSA candidates were taking on Black establishment figures outside of the bubble of New York City, he said, “This is absolutely a definitive trend. We can especially say this after the [recent] elections results in Atlanta, where DSA scored major wins for Black candidates against the Black establishment in DC and Atlanta.”

Siddique was referring to Janeese Lewis George, a Black, 38-year-old, DSA-endorsed member of the Council of the District of Columbia, who beat fellow Council member Kenyan McDuffie in the Washington, DC’s Democratic mayoral primary. Siddique noted that George won predominately Black wards like the 7th and 8th, and lost in more predominately white, affluent areas like Georgetown.

And in Atlanta, Mathewos Samson won the Democratic primary to represent the majority Black District 58 in the Georgia State House. A political newcomer who joined the DSA in 2025, Samson, according to the Atlanta Civil Circle, was drafted by the DSA to run literally a day before the primary filing deadline in March. If Samson wins the general election in November, he will be joining white City Council Member Kelsea Bond as the second DSA representative in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s old neighborhood, according to New York DSA co-chair, Gustavo Gordillo.

The competitiveness of DSA candidates in urban areas with significant Black populations has “been decades in the making from the people who’ve been in power, who’ve built up this political establishment,” said Siddique. “That’s why a strong universalist message that’s coming from Democratic Socialist candidates is resonating deeply, especially in increasingly immigrant and Black and working-class racialized communities where the political establishment has been really out of touch.”

Inside New York, you don’t have to look too far beyond Central Brooklyn to find similar dynamics in Democratic Party primaries. Throughout the city, the replacement of New York’s second Black mayor, Eric Adams, by Zohran Mamdani at the hands of an emboldened left flank of the party, have put existential fears in the hearts of mainstream Black and Brown Democratic politicians in gentrifying districts across the boroughs. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, DSA’s Christian Celeste Tate is going up against Assembly Member Erik Dilan. In Manhattan’s Washington Heights and Harlem, New York’s most famous Black Mecca, DSA’s Darializa Avila Chevalier is challenging US Rep. Adriano Espaillat, and DSA’s Conrad Blackburn is going up against Assembly Member Jordan Wright, who represents Harlem. Even those who consider themselves unimpeachably progressive aren’t immune, like former Mamdani ally, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who is being challenged by a DSA’s Assembly Member Claire Valdez in Western Queens and Northern Brooklyn.

A new New York is not on the horizon. It’s already here.

This article appears in the June 19th on-line edition of The Nation and is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

Is “F1” a 3 hour video game? Perhaps. A crown pleaser? I guess. But a cinematic venture worthy of a best picture nod? Nah.

Fifteen minutes into the film, I asked my 18-year-old son to predict the plot lines and ending. He nailed it. That’s because the script practically writes itself: Race car journeyman Sonny Hayes, (Brad Pitt,) is asked by a friend/rival Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) to mentor and be a teammate to a brash, but brilliant young driver Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris) through a nine-race, Formula 1 Grand Prix schedule. The catch is, the team’s investors will sell the team unless Sonny and Joshua are able to win one of those nine races. Can Sonny and Joshua, two willful alpha dogs who literally clash at every turn, learn to work together and win a race in order to save the team? Duh.

“F1” admirably, but implausibly, populates the world of Formula 1 racing with lots of Black people and women. Unfortunately, they are set pieces in a soulless star f*ck of a film. “F1” is ultimately a live action “Cars,” with sprinkles of “Top Gun” and “Bull Durham,” a fast and furious string of cliches with rapid fire race talk and high tech gadgetry. Maybe we should just call it “Formulaic One,” rated PG for Pretty Gassy.

9. “Bugonia”

“Bugonia” director Yorgos Lanthimos, known for highly stylized, acclaimed films such as “Poor Things” and “The Favourite,” is, like most auteurs, an acquired taste. “Bugonia,” a quirky lampoon of capitalist icons and conspiracy theories, features Emma Stone as a titan-of-industry cover girl, Michelle Fuller, who gets kidnapped by a couple hapless incel cousins who accuse her of being an humanity-destroying alien.

The droopily bullying “brain” of the outfit, Teddy Gatz, is played with perfect pitch by Jesse Plemons, who seems incapable of giving less than a command performance these days. Emma Stone is once again quite at home in Lanthimos’ Bizzaro world that is as dark and twisted as it is ridiculous. Depending on how much cannabis you’ve ingested, you will find the ending either delightfully satisfying or dismissively goofy.

8. “Marty Supreme”

Who better to play the role of the self-promoting, hustler-narcissist Marty Mauser than Timothée Chalamet. These days it seems the further Chalamet gets away from inspired arthouse-adjacent films (“Call Me by Your Name,” “To the Bone and “The King”) and insists on piling on vanity projects like Marty Supreme,” “A Complete Unknown” and “Wonka,” the more he toggles between proving to be his generation’s most gifted performer and a self-indulgent celebrity twit.

“Marty Supreme” director Josh Safdie takes an unstoppable Jewish shoe salesman, and the seemingly random sport of table tennis, and creates a spiraling, fever-pitched rendition of the American Dream. Chalamet is surrounded by a more than competent ensemble, notably Odessa A’zion as his Baby-Mama, Rachel Mizler; Tyler the Creator as Marty’s literal partner-in-crime, Wally; and Abel Ferrara as the menacingly off-kilter, Ezra Mishkin. But the film is really all Timothée, all the time. Like the Adam Sandler character in Safdie’s exquisite “Uncut Gems,” Marty hurtles through the movie with high energy, low restrain schemes that are so self sabotaging and ill conceived that you will find yourself wincing from beginning to end.

Does the film work? I guess. Chalemet’s Marty ekes out enough charm and moxie that we care just enough about him to make the storytelling worth it.

7. “Frankenstein”

Beginning with the 1931 film, “Frankenstein”, the image of a flat-topped monster with neck electrodes has dominated pop culture renderings of Victor Frankenstein’s creature. Guillermo del Toro delivers us from that hackneyed visual by returning to the source material, Mary Shelly’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Del Toro doesn’t update or modernize the story, as much as revitalize it. And as convenient as it is to watch it in the comfort of your own home, del Toro’s “Frankenstein” is best enjoyed on the big screen where the sumptuous production design and cinematography restore Shelly’s story to its original epic, if not somewhat histrionic, grandeur.

The fundamentals of Shelly’s tale remain intact in the film: An over-reaching scientist, Victor Frankenstein, stitches together body parts from corpses and brings a new being to life, only to recoil in horror at the sight of his creation. The Creature, spurned both by Victor and society in general, learns his origin story, seeks revenge, and eventually confronts Victor for making, then abandoning, him.

It’s all more than a little hokey and over-wrought, but Jacob Elordi’s vocal and physical performances as The Creature create the conditions for legit pathos. Like Shelly, del Toro mines the two narrative arcs of Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost — the fall of Adam and Eve, and Lucifer’s explosion from heaven — to ask worthwhile existential questions about why God granted us life only to forsake and plunge us into despair.

6. “Sentimental Value”

It would be unfair to reduce “Sentimental Value,” directed by Danish-Norwegian director Joachim Trier, to a story of a woman with daddy issues, but it wouldn’t be inaccurate. After a period of estrangement, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) comes back into the lives of his daughters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) after the death of his daughters’ mother. An internationally famous director in his twilight, Gustav casts a long shadow, and his return is prompted in part by an attempt to cast Nora, an accomplished stage actor in her own right, in his most recent, and most personal film.

The central tension in “Sentimental Value” follows Gustav’s clumsy and tone deaf attempts to not only cast Nora, but to reconcile his broken relationship with her and grapple with the generational trauma that haunts the lives of the Borgs and their family home. If nothing else, Scandinavian films are known for brooding realism and excavating the interior lives of their characters, and to that end, “Sentimental Value” is fully on brand. But despite its sullen rhythms, “Sentimental Value” manages to end with hope and redemption.

5. “Train Dreams”

“Train Dreams” is true to its name. A quiet, contemplative film, it drifts along the screen like a wraith. Set in Bonners Ferry, Idaho in the early 1900s, when railroads, industrialism and expansionism were indiscriminately carving through American soil, “Train Dreams” is told through the eyes of Robert Grainer (Joel Edgerton), a humble white migrant laborer whose only ambition is to earn enough coin to settle a plot of land with his wife and child. Behind Robert’s eyes we witness the everyday grind and lethal, sometimes murderous, exploitation of American workers, and the unforgiving terrain of the American frontier.

The defining plot point is a tragedy that irretrievably weighs crushingly on Robert and the storytelling, which in turn propels a meditation on the power of love, loss and solitude. While much can be said about Edgerton’s evocative performance, it is “Train Dreams” cinematography and Washington State location that prove to be unforgettably ethereal and transcendent.

4. “Hamnet”

Not since “Shakespeare in Love” has a major commercial film taken such ambitious license with the life of William Shakespeare. “Hamnet” hues closely to the historically factual outline of The Bard’s life, with a sharp focus on his marriage and family life in the Stratford countryside, as well as a speculative telling of what inspired him to write Hamlet. But director Chloé Zhao is far less interested in the trappings of a biopic with a 400-year-old subject. Instead, Zhao, who infused “Nomadland” with a documentary-like urgency, employs a distinct lyricism, blended at times with magical realism, to explore the ties that bind families, the processing of grief, and the sublime potency of art.

As considerable as Zhao’s storytelling talents are, the cast is called on to carry a daunting amount of emotional weight. Emily Watson as William’s mother, and Jacobi Jupe and Olivia Lynes as Shakespeare’s twins, are precise and arresting. Paul Mescal endows Shakespeare with a soulfulness that is rarely attributed to him in our popular imaginations. But it’s Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, who gives the performance of a lifetime, with her face doing more heavy lifting in the last scenes of the film than is reasonable to expect from any actor.

“Hamnet” is not just heartbreaking, but heart stirring. And perhaps its greatest triumph is that, as worn out as Shakespeare’s Hamlet has become in popular culture, Zhao has somehow made it feel brand new.

3. “The Secret Agent”

Set in a 1977 Brazil that is laboring under military dictatorship, the “Secret Agent” follows Armando (Wagner Moura), a whistleblower and former academic researcher, who is forced to go into hiding in a political dissident refuge using the assumed name of Marcelo.

“The Secret Agent” has a lot of moving plot parts, which are all the more tricky to follow because of references to Brazilian culture and history that will likely go over the heads of the average non-Brazilian viewer. Not only do we get a glimpse of Armando’s complicated relationship with his family, mostly in the form of his in-laws, son, and late wife, but we get introduced to Brazil’s corrupt underbelly that features crooked police in cahoots with hit men and corporate kingpins. The refugee community that Armando joins include dead people walking with bounties on their heads. They form a kaleidoscope of human dislocation and secret identities prompted by the threats of violence and political repression. Even the house cat living among them has two faces.

One of the most fascinating subplots involves the absurdly comic lengths that the press must go through, and the code they must speak, in order to report on authoritative terror going on in plain sight. But these bursts of humor are subsumed by the false narratives of a government that can re-engineer reality and redirect the telling of history itself. For a nation and those like Armando who live under the thumb of the absolutely and brutally powerful, refuge is an illusion. Even long after the state is toppled, there is no happy ending for generations to come.

2. “One Battle After Another”

Like the American political war zone we currently live in, there is plenty to divide audiences in “One Battle After Another,” an uproariously satirical takedown of white supremacy and the fascist cabal it rode in on. Produced, written and directed by auteur Paul Thomas Anderson and inspired by the Thomas Phinchon novel, “Vineland,” “One Battle” tells the story of the French 75, a rag-tag band of underground revolutionaries. French 75 seeks to liberate southern border migrants from the clutches of modern day slave catchers and an repressive American militarized regime led by a wacky secret society of white supremecists.

Perhaps Anderson’s riskiest take in “One Battle” is his hyper-sexualization of Black women members of French 75. Teyana Taylor’s physicality seizes complete control of the screen and her character, Perfidia, deploys Black woman magic like a heat-seeking missile. Is it yet another example of the male-gaze of a white film maker stereotypically reducing yet another deeply flawed Black woman character to their sexual parts? Or is Perfidia a subversively complex character who is harnessing the meager agency granted her by a society that routinely crushes and relegates Black women to the bottom of the social order? You decide.

“One Battle” is full of thrills and guilty pleasures that barrel down the road with manic abandon. This is easily Sean Penn’s juciest role and performance in years. And while Leonardo DiCaprio is the headliner, Bernicio del Toro quietly steals the show from him whenever they share a frame, as does Teyana Taylor. The real disappointment is that she doesn’t spend more time on the screen.

For anyone who has invested much of their life in movement activism, “One Battle” is a movie for this moment. It reminds us that while politics and movements are performative, their stakes are real.

1. “Sinners”

Although director Ryan Coogler has, with “Sinners,” both feet planted in the elements of gore and the supernatural, he ain’t just there for the cheap thrills. Set in the sharecropping American South of 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, the Black townsfolk are not only eventually besieged by vampires, but the violence of the Klan, the apartheid trauma of southern poverty, and the allure of city life that drove the Great Migration are also crashing the gates.

“Sinners” finds the Smoke/Stack twins, each brother played with a mesmerizing gangsta charm by Michael B. Jordan, returning to their home in Clarksdale after 7 years in Chicago, flush with the spoils and cockiness of their extralegal success. The special effects that place Jordan twice in the same frame are seamless enough to allow us to often forget that an actor is sharing a cigarette, arguing, and even literally wrestling with himself.

No sooner than Smoke and Stack land, they look to mark their re-settlement in Clarksdale with a juke joint jam of all jammies. In doing so, they each reunite with their former loves, the healer and spiritually dialed-in Annie, played with level-gazing intensity by Wunmi Mosaku, and the mixed-race Mary, played by Haille Steinfeld

Smoke and Stack recruit the region’s most talented blues musicians, the veteran Delta Slim (a triumphantly on-his-game Delroy Lindo), and the twins’ young cousin, Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore, an absurdly gifted Miles Cator. Before long, we realize Sammie is a modern day griot whose voice and guitar strokes are so siren-like that they have the power to pierce the boundaries between past, present and future, and attract the forces of evil like bees to honey.

By the time we arrive at the nighttime juke joint party, a trio of white vampires are hungry for blood and some good-ass music. True to the popular conviction that white American musicianship is perpetually scanning for a rhythm and soulfulness absent among its own, the vampires come looking to not only hear Sammie’s glistening talent, but to claim, appropriate and swallow it whole.

For all its horror creds and dramatic moments, the extended human-vampire standoff represents the cheesiest and most unoriginal moments of the movie. However, when it’s at its best, “Sinners” lavishes love on a lush musicscape. The highly talked about standout scene in the juke joint masterfully captures the historical singularity of Black music as the builder of community and as a life-giving intersection point of creative genius, pain and resilience. By dramatizing artists, musical genres and syncopations communicating with one another across a space-time continuum, Coogler shows himself to be beautifully articulate in a cinematic language rarely experienced outside of a music documentary.

As he proved in “Black Panther,” Coogler unapologetically delights in rearranging racial narratives. He has no problem showing Black people battle their own demons and one another, but his greatest crowd-pleasing gestures are in depicting ascendent Black power and the vanquishing of white supremacy. The liberatory delivery system in Sinners, however, is not politics, but song. “Sinners“ understands music as an alchemy that can heal and transform, as well as poison.

At best, any casual music consumer would find the avant-garde work of musician, composer and bandleader Sun Ra transportive. At worst, they may find it frustratingly inscrutable. Sun Ra wrote in 1972 that “Imagination is a magic carpet / Upon which we may soar / To distant lands and climes / And even go / beyond the moon / To any planet in the sky / If we came from / nowhere here / Why can’t we go somewhere there?” All this may indeed be true, but any piece of abstract art, en route to “somewhere there,” can be as disorienting as it is liberating. Without fixed or familiar reference points, we can get lost in space.

Christine Turner, who produced and directed the documentary film, “Sun Ra: Do the Impossible” for the documentary production house, Firelight Media, must have instinctively known this, which is why I imagine she took on the task of bravely guiding us through the magical mystery tour that is the life and mind of Sun Ra. Sun Ra, the pioneering Afrofuturist, is indeed one of the most fascinating, prolific and accomplished artists of the 20th century. He also is one of the least understood and hard to understand. It’s not just because his musical trajectory is so long – ranging from the more classical traditions of ragtime and swing, to less structured and often highly improvisational forms of bebop and free jazz – but because Sun Ra himself purposefully defied classification. He was as much a fearless philosopher, scholar and performance iconoclast as he was a miner of acoustic subterrains. He famously said, “The impossible attracts me because everything possible has been done and the world didn’t change.”

“Do the Impossible” doesn’t betray Sun Ra’s ethos by trying to make him wholly linear and legible, but instead honors it by providing context and observation. Although few specifics are known about his early years - Sun Ra consistently provided contradictory versions of his origin story, which included being a citizen of the planet Saturn - the film shares some basics: The earthly form of Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in 1914 in Alabama. He reportedly taught himself how to play the piano as well as read and compose music. He was heavily influenced by the blues singers and big bands of the early years of jazz, served a jail bid as a WWII conscientious objector, and went on to factor prominently in the growth of the Chicago jazz scene. He gained the moniker “Sonny” as a child, but shed his slave name by legally becoming Le Sony’r Ra in 1952. He started a record label in the early fifties, formed an “arkestra” that went by dozens of names, and for the next forty years prodigiously recorded more than 200 albums, wrote over a thousand compositions, and toured the world wearing outfits that fused space age and ancient Egyptian themes.

But you can retrieve much of that information from Wikipedia. “Do the Impossible,” which is entirely scored with Sun Ra’s music, is a wondrous celebration of the ideas, visuals and sounds that Sun Ra conjured. We are introduced to his eclectic and encyclopedic literacy, and hear his views on metaphysics and “transmolecularization.” We view his concerts, some of which feature more conventional big band performances, to more outrageous pageants of far-out costume parades, free-form dance, spoken word, and what can only be described honestly as noise. In one concert scene, Sun Ra has his back to the key board while randomly banging on keys to chaotic effect.

Perhaps the juiciest moments of the film are the line up of musicians, dancers, vocalists, scholars and critics who serve as a collective Rosetta Stone for Sun Ra’s body of work. Many describe the experience of performing and working with Sun Ra, from his disciplined work ethic, and no nonsense, no drug nor alcohol, rehearsals, to his cheapskate management ways. Some of the commenters were clearly part of his cult of personality, but others simply had respectful and generous interpretations, declaring that he was “preparing us for a different world,” creating “portals to other dimensions,” and “saving our people.” What was particularly interesting were the observations that Sun Ra had more of a maternal energy than a fatherly one, and that he confounded easy categorizations of sex, gender and racial identity as much as he did musical identity. He both rejected the conventional limitations in our human forms and minds, but fiercely championed our human-ness. He was intense and ostentatious, but probably took himself less seriously than most people assumed.

Although Sun Ra died in 1993, the Sun Ra Arkestra continues to record and perform under the leadership of Marshall Allen to this day. “Do the Impossible” helps us understand that before Little Richard, George Clinton, Octavia Butler, Afrikka Bambaattaa, Saul Williams, Janelle Monae, and Lady Gaga beamed onto the popular culture scene from other universes, there was the counter-cultural Sun Ra challenging us to not just think outside the box, but to dismantle the box entirely. As jazz is increasingly relegated to the cultural margins, and artists of all genres are namelessly Spotified, “Do the Impossible” confidently asserts Sun Ra’s place in the pantheon of musical revolutionaries.

“Sun Ra: Do the Impossible” premieres nationwide on PBS on February 20, 2026, at 9 p.m. ET. (Check local listings), pbs.org/americanmasters and the PBS App.

This article appears in the February 19, 2026 edition of the New York Amsterdam News and is republished with the publisher’s permission.

As the world reflects on the life of Rev. Jesse Jackson, it’s hard to fully appreciate the impact of his 1984 presidential run, in which Jackson finished third in the Democratic primary, and his 1988 race, in which he won a total of 11 state primaries and caucuses.

It’s not just because few voters and historians alike believe that Jackson could have ever won the general election. It’s also because much of what he pioneered has since been taken for granted. Anti-Blackness may still haunt our elections, but in the 40 years since Jackson ran, Black candidates are now perennial fixtures of the national Democratic Party primary scene. And the vision of a class-identified, multi-racial democracy that was promoted by Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, is now being championed by the likes of today’s Working Families Party and other social justice formations.

Long before the Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigns helped inspire millennials and members of Gen Z, the Jackson campaigns mobilized and shaped the progressive sensibilities of a generation of post-Civil Rights activists. We no longer believed in the idea of a messianic single Black leader in the mold of King or Malcolm, but we were ready to see national politics, somewhat naively, as the next racial justice frontier.

As a wide-eyed college student in 1984, I campaigned for Jesse both on campus and on the streets of Providence, Rhode Island, as well as in New York City. I also went on to register people to vote in the South and in New York in service of his campaign. For my peers and me, Jackson was unapologetically Black before we even recognized the need for such a term. He was also the first politician I ever met who explicitly welcomed poor White people, disaffected farmers, Latinos, Asians, immigrants and LGTBQ folk under the same tent as Black people, and named us all as refugees of American democracy.

Donna Brazile famously said what is now taken as conventional wisdom: “Without Reverend Jackson, there never would have been Barack Obama.” But it’s not that straightforward. A particular confluence of historical, cultural and demographic conditions led to Barack Obama’s acceptance by a plurality of the American electorate.

Similarly, Jackson’s candidacy was more nuanced than simply being the second Black candidate (following Rep. Shirley Chisholm) to seek the nomination for president of the United States, and his widening of political discourse is often overlooked. Jesse was the first and only successful presidential candidate to give full expression to an unequivocal revulsion towards and a rejection of South African apartheid. His recognition of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and his meeting with Yasser Arafat helped forge Black and progressive solidarity with the Palestinian people. And his diplomacy in areas like Syria, Cuba and throughout what was then referred to as the “Third World,” mainstreamed an identification with the people of the Global South.

And yet, Jackson established what is now a prerequisite for Black Democratic Party candidates – who are reflexively cast as angry and counter-American – to gain wide political acceptance. Leveraging the hope and spiritual gravitas of the Civil Rights movement, Jackson exhorted us to “keep hope alive” and he revitalized the Kingsian dream of people of diverse backgrounds living in racial and economic harmony — a campaign message that is rarely demanded of white candidates. As politically daring as the dashiki-wearing, Fidel Castro-hugging Jackson could often be, Obama’s candidacy suggests that Black Democratic Party candidates for elections to come will use some form of Jackson’s “up with hope,” big tent playbook to convince the American electorate that they are user-safe and uniquely patriotic.

If you want to measure American cultural regression, take a snapshot of how we are reacting to what’s lighting up screens, big and small, these days.

Exhibit A is the $7 million in ticket sales for the opening weekend of the vapid propaganda piece, Melania, one of the strongest openings for a documentary in over a decade. Exhibit B is the national handwringing (not to mention the expressions of confused racist jingoism) that preceded Bad Bunny’s Spanish-language lovefest at the Super Bowl.

And then there’s the extent to which candid gay sex on HBO Max - a full quarter of a century since Queer As Folk premiered on HBO - is still being treated as a rare and exotic event.

To be fair, there are compelling reasons why Heated Rivalry, the six-part Canadian export, has succeeded in charming American audiences. A love story set among the ranks of a fictional professional hockey league that is modeled on the NHL, Heated Rivalry focuses primarily on the evolving, but fully closeted, relationship between Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), a Canadian with Asian ancestry, and Russian Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie). Shane and Ilya are not just hockey players, but are in fact their sport’s biggest names and most celebrated archrivals. To put it in terms that non-hockey fans can understand, imagine what a juicy moment it would be if we had discovered in 1980 that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were secret lovers. Or if, 40 years later, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were found canoodling in a locker room.

The first couple of episodes are spent tracking Shane and Ilya as their physical attraction and serial hook ups labor under their need to hide their relationship from family and public view. The biggest challenge Willams and Storrie face as actors is rising above their obvious dreamy hunk status and the distinguishing personality features that are written into their characters. Case in point, Williams, tasked with portraying the sensitive and quiet Shane, often wilts before our eyes. It is unclear whether, as an actor, he lacks charisma or if he is slyly demonstrating how being closeted and sexually under-expressed can rob one’s personality of dimension and flavor. Storrie, on the other hand is able to push through the brash and blunt swagger of his character, Ilya, to reveal a convincing vulnerability.

What complicates the lives of our star-crossed lovers is that Ilya is actively bisexual while Shane has barely a faded interest in women. Either way, we see how the weight of shame drags on the romantic and emotional growth of their relationship. What helps provide perspective is the parallel relationship forming between another closeted hockey star Scott Hunter (François Arnaud), and a civilian barista, Kip Grady (Robbie Graham-Kuntz). In contrast to the series of stolen moments between Shane and Ilya, you come to appreciate the grounding and the liberated spaces that are made possible by Kip’s self-acceptance as an out man.

The multiple sex scenes propel much of the action in Heated Rivalry, but the story doesn’t truly get weighty and emotionally stirring until the latter episodes. By episode five we begin to move beyond a reliance on titillating sex scenes and feverish physical attraction as both sets of relationships begin to unfurl with increasing tenderness and higher stakes. Meanwhile, public tolerance of high profile gay identities in family life and professional male sports gets dramatically stress tested.

Created, written and directed by Jacob Tierney and adapted from the Game Changers novel series written by Rachel Reid, much of Heated Rivalry comes in rather conventional wrapping. Although audiences have swooned over its romantic and forbidden love trappings, the acting is not particularly noteworthy, the cast and world building is blandly white or white adjacent, and the production design has the generic quality that often comes with Canadian-made television drama. To be fair, Tierney himself has depicted it as a Harlequin romance. Other than the explicit sex, it feels more network TV than prestige streaming.

And yet, Heated Rivalry, mostly through word of mouth, has become a bonafide hit and is now the highest rated non-animated acquired series on HBO Max since the streaming platform launched in 2020. That’s because there is an irrepressible sweetness and even innocence about these men, these human beings, at the prime of their lives and vitality, who are just trying to find each other in a world that remains hostile to their expression of love. This is not new cinematic territory, but at a moment when queerness impressively flourishes in the WNBA while otherwise being conspicuously stripped from national public policy and public discourse (just earlier this month the Trump administration removed the pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument, of all places), Heated Rivalry is quietly subversive. It challenges the assumptions about masculinity and the rabid fear of a gay planet that dominate male professional sports.

This article appears in the February 12, 2026 edition of the New York Amsterdam News and is republished with the publisher’s permission.

Imagine you’re a Black playwright tasked with using just ten minutes of running time to make sense of contemporary Black American humanity. In its 17th season, The Fire This Time Festival invites emerging playwrights of African descent to do just that, make meaning of the moment in ten-minute increments. This year the festival begins a residency at The Apollo Stages at the Victoria (down the street from the Apollo Theater). Directed by Ken-Matt Martin, this year’s collection features 6 vignettes brought to life by an ensemble of 5 actors. It runs January 23-31.

Kelly Girod, the Festival’s Founder and Executive Producer, told me that the idea of ten-minute plays was born out of a frustration “with major theaters that would keep one slot available for a playwright of color…Doing ten-minute plays allows us to feature seven to eight brand new playwright voices that the industry hasn’t heard of yet. You get to travel to so many different worlds over the course of 90 minutes.”

When I attended this past Saturday, the frigid temperatures were conspiring against Girod’s cast and crew. The theater was cold, the lighting board failed and began working just in time for the start of the show, and one of the plays had to restart after a backstage costume malfunction.

But the show went on, pretty successfully I might add. Rather than dimming the enthusiasm, the production glitches inspired the audience and served as a reminder to celebrate the resilience of Black art and theater in the midst of hostile conditions and scarcity.

The festival’s 6 plays leaned into this ethos with a lively range of genres and room tones. Two of the plays are comedies, but also deliver the most explicit political statements of the evening. Using flashes of absurdity, “Black to the Save the Day,” written by Preston Crowder, and “Goose,” by DeLane McDuffie, each question who is down for the cause of Black liberation, who’s pretending, and who is shucking and jiving. “Black to the Save the Day” is a raucous romp that employs broad satirization and superhero tropes to make bold swipes at gentrification, white supremacy and the process of selling out. Inventively costumed and energetically delivered, “Black to Save the Day” moved with the breathlessness of an unhinged SNL skit and the silliness of a Mad Magazine feature.

In comparison, “Goose” is more subtle and straightforward in its metaphorical language. In the spirit of Spike Lee’s “Get on the Bus,” a group of Black activists trade ideological arguments and philosophies on their way to a protest action. Well paced and imaginatively written, “Goose” pokes fun at Black social change narratives – Which revolutionary road are we on anyway? – while delivering a deliciously satisfying easter egg of an ending.

The remaining productions are more sober and intimate. “Everything But-,” written by Tenia Micazia Brown, and “Clumsy,” by Mo Holmes, explore one-on-one clashes between peers. “Everything But-,” is the more intricate and emotionally ambitious. Situated in the waning moments of a young couple’s argument, at issue is Ezra’s infidelity and Thea’s attempts to make sense of his betrayal in real time. The dialogue guides us through Ezra’s smoothly delivered, but profoundly flawed attempts to rationalize his cheating ways while showcasing the emotional abstractions that Thea uses to coolly deconstruct and dismantle them. At Saturday’s performance, the women in the audience served as Thea’s amen corner.

Mo Holmes’ “Clumsy,” which tells the story of a woman who offers to cook grits for a drunk driver who plows into her kitchen with his car, never manages to successfully rise above its random premise to provide a fully intelligible viewing experience.

The remaining plays in the festival line up are micro family dramas that place us at pivotal end-of-life junctures. “White Diamond,” written by Donathan Walters, finds a mother, Andrea, and her son, Hakeem, sifting through Andrea’s late mother’s belongings in preparation for her funeral. Looking for the deceased’s broach provides the opportunity for Hakeem to confront Andrea about accepting his boyfriend and to make a stunning revelation about her identity. In portraying Andrea, Nikiya Mathias gives perhaps the most fully lived-in performance of the evening.

The emotional stakes in “DNR,” written by Naomi Lorrain and excerpted from a conventional-length play, are recognizable to anyone who has navigated the financial and relational challenges of caretaking a terminally ill loved one. In DNR, god-fearing, duck hunting Solomon is keeping a vigil over his mother who is on life support. His estranged cousin, Nikki, has returned to their hometown to share her feelings about her aunt’s condition and to make a heart-wrenching proposal to Solomon. The dialogue moves effectively and captures the universal intricacies of family politics.

The focus of The Fire This Time Festival is on the scripts and performances. To note that the set design and props are minimal to non-existent would be to miss the point. Ultimately, The Fire This Time Festival is a showcase for Black voices and Black theater demanding to be heard.

This article appears in the January 29, 2026 edition of the New York Amsterdam News and is republished with the publisher’s permission.

10: Man on the Inside (Comedy series, Season 2, Netflix)

Intrigue Factor: Who-Done-It for the 70-and-older set.

Most prestige-level shows worth watching are heavy on graphic violence, sex, cursing and drugs — which honestly, who am I kidding, are my jam. But I’m also here for “nice,” innocuous-but-quality-made streaming shows. There are Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso and Shrinking, and ABC/Hulu’s Abbott Elementary at the top of the heap, and now there’s Man on The Inside, starring Ted Danson as a widower and former professor of engineering who has found a new lease on life when he stumbles upon a career as a private detective.

Man on the Inside is low-stakes crime mystery that focuses primarily on the lives of older people and the multi-generational relationships they keep. Season 2 has moved on from the charming and seldom explored contours of an elder care facility that made Season 1 so endearing, but Ted Danson returns with the same zaddy charisma and nerdy sense of humor that continues to make this show so watchable across seasons. Bonus: Seeing Danson in romantic scenes with his real-life wife, Mary Steenburgen.

9: Task (Drama limited series, HBO Max)

Intrigue Factor: Crime Dad vs. Cop Dad

Set in the rural, blue collar outskirts of Philadelphia, Task is a family drama folded into a crime thriller. What emerges is a haunting symmetry between Tom and Robbie, two single fathers whose personal and professional lives are marked by family trauma, intra-squad tensions, and snitches. At its best, Task interrogates thorny themes like familial loyalty and what it takes to be a true head of the household. It sensitively travels the fault lines of interracial adoption without referencing race; masculinity and patriarchy without calling out gender; and privilege without being explicit about any social hierarchy. And while Tom and Robbie seldom rise adequately to the crises they are faced with, their respective class upbringings pre-determine their divergent fates.

8) The Diplomat (Drama/Comedy series, Season 3, Netflix)

Intrigue Factor: Making Diplomacy Sexy

The Diplomat is the perfect cocktail of televised palace intrigue: Smart government machinations and tricky plot twists with dashes of frisky comedy and sexual tension. In short, The Diplomat is fun, and Season 3 maintains the same level of quality that put it on this past year’s Emmy nominee list.

Keri Russell stars in the title role as Kate Wyler, a highly respected veteran of the foreign service. In the first season, Kate becomes the American ambassador to the United Kingdom, only to discover that she is being groomed and positioned for bigger things by higher ups and her insufferably meddling husband, Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewall). Sewall is charming while also being creepy, while David Gyasi is both commanding and vulnerable as Austin Dennison, the UK Foreign Service and Kate’s mutual lust interest. The likes of Rory Kinnear, Allison Janney, and Michael McKean are also on hand to make the quick-fire script pop and glisten.

7) Severance (Drama series, Season 2, Apple TV+)

Intrigue Factor: “So, an innie, an outtie and a sheep walk into a bar …”

The most satisfying element of Severance is its quirky originality. Beyond the broad category of science fiction, Severance doesn’t fit neatly into any television genre and thus is not bound by many formulas or narrative conventions. The Lumon Industries building, for instance, the setting for much of the action, is a surreal labyrinth of fluorescent lights, sterile hallways, and twisted psycho-engineering lurking behind every door. Season 2’s innie-outtie world travel is mind-bending and Tramell Tillman continues to provide one of the most inspired supporting performances on television. This inventiveness reliably keeps viewers off balance and clueless about what’s coming next, and the Season 2 finale will leave you smacking your lips in anticipation of the next season.

6) Forever (Drama limited series, Netflix)

Intrigue Factor: The fierce urgency of Black teenage love

It’s rare to find fully realized Black teenage love on screen. Created by television veteran Mara Brock Akil, whose credits include Girlfriends, Moesha, and The Jamie Foxx Show, Forever doesn’t so much escape the dictates of the teenage romance genre, as much as endows it with flesh-and-blood and a cultural currency that Black audiences in particular can recognize and appreciate.

5) Bel-Air (Drama Series, Season 4, Peacock)

Intrigue Factor: Fresh Prince, Seriously

If only I could have been in the room when the creators of Bel-Air had the bright idea to turn the goofy fan favorite, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, into a soapy behind-the-scenes look at wealthy Black excellence. As it turns out, you can’t spend five minutes watching this show without tripping over a cliché or getting smothered with pro-Blackity-Black moralism and propaganda. But Bel-Air is all heart and its storylines are as engaging as they are implausible. It’s a Black fantasy land that is somehow rooted in Black realness.

Season 4 accomplishes what few other streaming series do: It ends a complete story with a natural and satisfying arc. Unlike its prototype, All American, which started in high school and shamelessly wandered into the college and post-college life of its protagonists, Bel-Air comes to a close shortly after high school graduation.

If nothing else, Bel-Air is about turbulent high school life against the backdrop of a supportive Black family and community. In Season 4, the main characters are so irrepressibly anchored in Black self-love that you can’t help but get misty and throw up your fist in affirmation every time these Black angels hug one another and get their wings. Remember, the main character’s name is literally Will Smith, so perhaps the most satisfying payoff comes in the last minutes of the season finale when a special celebrity guest appears as Will’s grown self, offers him adult reassurance, but confesses that he will “f*** up” later in life. Priceless.

4) The Perfect Neighbor (Film, Netflix)

Intrigue Factor: When Karen comes packing, through the lens of the system

The Perfect Neighbor recounts the events that lead to the June 2023 fatal shooting in Ocala, Florida of Ajike “AJ” Owens, a 35-year-old Black mother of four, at the hands of Susan Lorincz, a white woman. The conceit of The Perfect Neighbor is that it employs a near-total reliance on strung-together found footage from surveillance technology. The elements or the story are as familiar and American as week-old apple pie -- an old racist white woman, less-then-helpful cops, and the everyday joy of Black children viewed as menacing — but not a complete one. The Perfect Neighbor could be construed as a bonus episode of “Cops” or an act of police blotter journalism - “just the facts, m’am” - so there is no opportunity to learn anything about AJ’s life or Susan much less anything about the community or other families in the film, outside this unfortunate series of events.

The first half of the film appears to be yet another demoralizing tale of a racist homicide that the American criminal justice system cynically dresses up and justifies as “self defense.” But the story eventually pivots into a quiet observation of Florida’s use of its “Stand Your Ground” law and reminds us just how fickle, arbitrary, and unreliable the promise of American justice continues to be.

3) Sean Combs: The Reckoning (Limited documentary series, Netflix)

Intrigue Factor: When Fiddy comes for Diddy

The Reckoning does for Sean “Puffy” Combs what Surviving R. Kelly did for the ‘90s R&B star. It takes all of the rumors, sexual assault reports, and general fiendishness associated with a pop culture icon, and matches it all up with some pretty damning receipts. The fact that this four-part documentary was executive produced by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson — Puffy’s rival in the rap music-cum-business mogul game — adds an element of reputational drive-by to its spotty, if not enviable, investigative journalism.

The documentary does little to build or fully explain the specific criminal case for which Puffy was recently on trial. And while some of the stories about Puffy make you clutch your pearls, the parade of former music and business associates who line up to accuse Puffy of sexual assault, corruption, and soullessness are easy to believe for anyone who grew up hearing about Puffy’s exploits. Who among us, for instance, hasn’t already concluded that Puffy was responsible for Tupac’s death? But to learn that all the Reckoning’s unflattering personal footage of Puffy (which was recorded around the time of his recent arrest) was not only commissioned by Puffy himself, but was made available to the public because of his failure to pay the videographer, felt poetic. And to have a Crip gang leader drop the bombshell that Puffy paid him to assassinate Tupac, dropped Puffy’s pop culture standing from sketchy to irredeemably deplorable.

2) Andor (Drama series, Season 2, Disney +)

Intrigue Factor: Disney gets all anti-facist on us

What makes Andor worth watching is that it’s a less-than-glamorous take on the process of revolution building, the sacrifices that come with political radicalization, and the moral compromises made on the road to being a true believer.

Up to now, it wasn’t only the action in the Star Wars franchise that unfolded light-years away. The politics felt far removed as well. But in the second and last season of Andor, there is thankfully little of the hocus pocus of The Force, and the Empire’s oppression feels closer to home and more familiar. Specifically, the Empire looks like a plausible MAGA future in its suppression of human rights, control over the media, and authoritarian blunt force. It’s no wonder that Disney only tried to get away with two seasons of Andor, so catch it while you can. You will probably never again see the creators of Mickey Mouse get away with being this subversive.

1) Adolescence (Limited Series, Netflix)

Intrigue Factor: The Kids Ain’t Alright.

I challenge you to find a more sublime tour de force of television story, form, and character development. From its explosive opening scene, to its heart-wrenching finale, Adolescence is an unflinching social autopsy.

A 13-year-old boy is accused of killing a girl from his school. In four, one-take episodes, the camera retraces the steps of a toxic teen culture as it wends its way through a working class family, school, community and criminal justice system. If you’re a parent, be warned. Adolescence is all the more emotionally harrowing because of its realism, its depictions of violence, and the depths of rage and sadness it is willing to plumb.

This article appears in the December 18, 2025 edition of the New York Amsterdam News with the publisher’s permission.

“Well, they tell me of a pie up in the sky

Waiting for me when I die

But between the day you’re born and when you die

They never seem to hear even your cry

So as sure as the sun will shine,

I’m going to get what’s mine.”

—Jimmy Cliff, “The Harder they Come”

Back in the aughts when I deejayed a Caribbean Night for a Brooklyn restaurant, I would play Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come whenever I wanted to get folks across generations on the dance floor. The track is high energy enough so that millennial ragamuffins could groove to it, and nostalgic enough that my mother and her middle-class Jamaican peers would deliriously shimmy their hips to it, Cliff’s effusive tenor commanded us to a high-stepping celebration of resilience in the Babylon system.

Cliff, who died on Nov. 24 at the age of 81 from pneumonia, according to his wife, Latifa Chambers, represented an era when Jamaican music went from the parochial urgencies of ska and rocksteady to the international ambitions of reggae. Cliff was known as a world cultural ambassador for reggae and a cross-genre songwriting and singing talent.

For all his reggae cred, however, Cliff never aspired to be a true roots reggae artist, nor did he ever achieve the icon status of Bob Marley, against whom he was often measured. Born a Christian, he dabbled in Rastafarianism and Islam, but eventually positioned himself as a philosophically ecumenical man of the world and a universalist. One of pop music’s most stirring compositions, Cliff’s Many Rivers to Cross, for instance, vibed more with gospel soul than reggae. He collaborated with the likes of the Rolling Stones, Kool and the Gang, Paul Simon, and Elvis Costello, and his compositions often checked dance, R&B, or rock boxes. His seven Grammy nominations and two wins, his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as well as his being awarded the Order of Merit, Jamaica’s highest honor in the arts and sciences, are a sampling of his crowning achievements and a testament to his broad appeal.

Cliff wasn’t just a gifted singer/songwriter, but a magnetic performer as well. (Catch his breathtaking rendition of Many Rivers to Cross on Saturday Night Live). The renowned Jamaican music promoter, Ronnie Burke, who, as a part of Synergy Productions, co-founded the Reggae Sunsplash music festival, recounted to me that Cliff was the headlining artist in Sunsplash’s first concert series in 1978. Sunsplash went on to feature every big name in Caribbean music, including Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Third World, but Burke insisted that Cliff was “masterful” and gave the single greatest performance in the 18-year history of the festival.

James Chambers was born on July 30, 1944 in the Somerton District of St. James, located on the northwestern coast of Jamaica. From an early age, Chambers adopted the stage name “Jimmy Cliff” and began writing and performing music. While still a teenager, he teamed up with the famed Leslie Kong, who produced Cliff’s first hit, Hurricane Hattie, a catchy ska number. Cliff’s other early hits included King of Kings, Dearest Beverley and Miss Jamaica, and by the mid-1960s, Cliff was featured alongside other ska, reggae, and calypso pioneers such as Toots and the Maytals, as well as Byron Lee and the Dragonaires. Cliff’s talents were soon recognized by Island Records. They added him to their roster along with the Maytals and Bob Marley’s Wailers, which prompted Cliff to move to England.

Cliff enjoyed a successful career at Island where he put out noteworthy singles such as Wonderful World, Beautiful People, and Vietnam, but his life would never be the same after Island tapped him as the lead in Jamaica’s first widely distributed feature film, 1972’s The Harder They Come. Although strikingly low-budget, The Harder They Come became a cult classic that helped popularize reggae internationally. Cliff’s character in the film is Ivan Martin, a young man who arrives in Kingston from the countryside and eventually turns to crime to combat the exploitations of city life. He burns with the same kind of unstoppable passion to make it in the music business that Cliff later became known for. It also made Cliff a breakout star, less for his acting performance and more for the singles from the soundtrack — the haunting Many Rivers to Cross, the inspirational You Can Get It if You Really Want, the meditative Sitting In Limbo, and the infectious title track, The Harder They Come. Collectively, those songs arguably remain his greatest body of work.

Although Cliff wasn’t able to sustain this level of artistry for the remainder of his career, his star barely dimmed. Cliff never abandoned reggae, but throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, his music became decidedly more pop and led to hits like Reggae Night, participation on the anti-apartheid protest song, Sun City, and a popular cover of Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now that was featured in the 1993 comedy film Cool Runnings. The Grammys did not create the reggae category until 1985, so Cliff didn’t receive formal recognition from the American music market until more than 20 years into his career. His second and final Grammy was awarded in 2012 when he was nearing 70 years of age.

His international profile came at a cost. The legendary musician, producer, and Reggae Sunsplash emcee, Tommy Cowan, first discovered Jimmy Cliff’s music when they were both teenagers, and worked with him throughout his career. He told me that as early as the 1960s, when Cliff moved to England, he was perceived as being somewhat removed from Jamaica and was never fully embraced as a son of the soil like other reggae artists who were more grounded in a Jamaican identity and narrative.

Nonetheless, Cliff’s impact endures both inside Jamaica and across the world. “While Marley’s music was about his purpose and explaining what Rasta was,” observed Cowan, “Jimmy’s music was more about the journey he went through … Success for him was about getting across the hurdles of life. Jimmy wanted you to have a feeling: ‘I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.’ And yeah man, you’re in a better mood in life because ‘you can get it if you really want it.’ His music brought hope, inspiration, and aspiration.”

This article appears in the December 4, 2025 edition of the Amsterdam News and is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

It’s no secret that the Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro has been waiting all his life to make Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Del Toro has publicly made that claim while film critics have joyfully amplified it. All you have to do is go back to del Toro’s 2017 The Shape of Water to find his penchant for a tortured love story and gothic settings, not to mention his double-edge conceit of humanizing monsters and monstering humans.

And not a moment too soon. For almost a hundred years, beginning with the 1931 horror film Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff, the image of a flat-topped monster with neck electrodes has dominated pop culture renderings of Victor Frankenstein’s monster. Del Toro delivers us from that hackneyed visual by returning to the source material, Mary Shelly’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Del Toro doesn’t update or modernize the story, so much as revitalize it. And as convenient as it is to watch it in the comfort of your own home, del Toro’s Frankenstein is best enjoyed on the big screen where the sumptuous production design and cinematography restore Shelly’s story to its original sweeping, melodramatic grandeur.

The fundamentals of Shelly’s tale remain intact in the film: An arrogantly over-reaching scientist, Victor Frankenstein, stitches together body parts from corpses and brings a new being to life, only to recoil in horror at the sight of this creation. The Creature, spurned by Victor and the wider society, learns his origin story, seeks revenge, and eventually confronts Victor for making, then abandoning, him.

While these plot elements endure in del Toro’s telling, his alterations are significant. For one, del Toro’s Creature is far more sympathetic and less murderous than Shelly’s, and is endowed, arguably, with more capacity of humanity and tenderness than any other character in the film. Portrayed by the imposing 6’ 5” heartthrob Jacob Elordi, the Creature, unlike Shelly’s unsightly lump of flesh, moves with the latent sexual grace of an impaired modernist dancer, and shares smoldering moments with his love interest, Elizabeth. Making the Creature incapable of dying enhances the curse-of-life burden that the Creature labors with, but some of del Toro’s other departures from the novel — like making Elizabeth Victor’s sister-in-law in waiting, rather than his wife — feel unnecessary.

Oscar Issac endows Victor Frankenstein with the right blend of unhinged ambition and frailty. And in the spirit of the performance Sally Hawkins gives in The Shape of Water, Mia Goth is sufficiently otherworldly as to be believable in her character’s mutual attraction to the Creature. The world that del Toro creates, however, unmistakably belongs to Jacob Elordi, who will surely be nominated for an Oscar for this role. His vocal and physical performances create the conditions for the pathos and curiosity that his character so effectively evokes.

Del Toro’s fidelity to Shelly’s themes ultimately makes the film universal and timeless. Like Shelly, del Toro mines the two narrative arcs of Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost — the fall of Adam and Eve, and Lucifer’s explosion from heaven — to ask existential questions about why God granted us life only to plunge us into despair and ultimately forsake us. As a result, (spoiler alert) one of the film’s most inspiring moments arrives in the acts of grace at the end of the film. Before dying, Victor accepts the Creature and apologizes to him. In turn, the Creature comes to forgive Victor and, rather than continue his revenge and bitterness tour through eternity, he prepares to earn the spark of life that Victor has so recklessly granted him.

Still, the 19th century narcissism and amorality that lead Victor to toss aside dire warnings and give life to the Creature, should inevitably lead filmgoers to consider the 21st century purveyors of AI, whose disregard for ethical consequences is exceeded only by a pursuit of higher stock valuations. Like the Creature, AI is not only made up of enough human fragments and immortality to one day take our place on earth, it may very well prove to be more deserving of that place as well.

This article appears in the November 27, 2025 edition of the Amsterdam News and is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

I was in high school the first time I understood the significance of Eddie Murphy. Murphy had finished his first year on Saturday Night Live and a seventeen-year old classmate of mine, who regularly trolled New York City night life, gushed about slavishly following Murphy and his entourage around the city. Murphy was lighting up the screen with what would eventually include an all-star roster of indelible comedy characters like Gumby, Velvet Jones, Mr. Robinson and Buckwheat. But for my friend, Murphy’s talent was almost beside the point. While still a teenager, Murphy had become one of the world’s most famous celebrities.

It’s a theme as old as public entertainment and documentary film itself: The embodied tension between art and fame. Being Eddie, currently streaming on Netflix, enters this storytelling fray promising to give us a peek at the man behind the legend. The film is visually and structurally built around extended, present day interviews with Murphy as he is seated in and walks through his ridiculously sprawling mansion. We travel the arc of Murphy’s life, from his humble family and stand-up beginnings, to SNL and a movie career filled with peaks and valleys. Along the way, comedic royalty - Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Kevin Hart - drop by to genuflect as they describe Murphy’s role in the evolution of contemporary Black artistry and the American comic tradition.

For those who have only become familiar with Murphy in his later years and have wondered what all the fuss was about when he returned to SNL in an Emmy award-winning turn as host in 2019, Being Eddie does a thorough job of describing the scale and range of Murphy’s achievements and the extent to which he dominated pop culture in the eighties. Being Eddie recounts Murphy’s genius for creating and inhabiting characters on SNL and in dozens of movies, and captures how unprecedented it was for a Black actor at that time (and since) to show up in a movie, thoroughly command each scene, and make complete fools of all white people around him, as epitomized by the unforgettable bar scene in 48 Hours. Being Eddie also has some important things to say about how narrow the lane is for Black celebrityhood. At one point, the film comments on how Eddie Murphy was often publicly compared to and pitted against Richard Pryor, as if American popular imagination could only ration and withstand one breakout Black comedic talent at a time.

Being Eddie is so driven by Murphy’s present-day voice and perspective, that you fully expect him to receive an executive producer nod when the credits roll. But unlike celebrity vanity projects like Madonna: Truth or Dare, Beyonce’s Life is But a Dream or the daringly self-disassembling Aka Charlie Sheen, Being Eddie rarely allows Murphy to be sufficiently inward looking or vulnerable, even when discussing the death of his brother.

Murphy’s multiple romances, marriages and divorces are vaguely referred to, but these personal relationships are never examined, much less detailed. He talks about how he has centered his family in his life, but his children are reduced to B-roll fodder without names or backstories. Even when given a chance to reveal why and how he fell so hard off the public radar for a period of time in the aughts, Murphy offers a vague explanation, and largely leaves it to the viewer to fill in the blanks. In the end, Murphy strikes pensive and reflective poses and awkwardly laughs at his own observations, but rarely exposes much of himself. And other than making some bad movie choices and cringe-worthy music throughout his career, the flaws and neurodivergent spiciness that are essential features of any brilliant mind, are seldom acknowledged.

Perhaps the most striking evidence that Being Eddie is a heavy redaction of Murphy’s life and that his on-camera persona is largely self-engineered appears when Murphy casually discusses how he made a conscious decision to change his laugh because he didn’t like how it was being used in the public realm. While it’s fair to say that his signature guffaw is easily caricatured – much like the tics he famously parodies in his own impressions of personalities like Stevie Wonder or Bill Cosby - Murphy’s newest chortle is an unrecognizable affect, as if he underwent a botched personality transplant.

Being Eddie documents that Murphy is indeed one of the funniest men and character transformers to ever walk the planet, but that skill feels skin deep. Even Murphy at one point seems to admit that while he built routines around his genius for mimicry, he never developed a sophisticated comic and socially observant voice before he was swallowed up by movie stardom. And his suggestion that the Academy never awarded him an Oscar because of political remarks he once made tends to overstate the subversive threat that he posed and his accomplishments as a dramatic actor.

It would be indeed unfair to compare Murphy to Richard Pryor if not for the fact that Murphy made no secret of the fact that he studied and revered Pryor. They both eventually succumbed to film roles that were unworthy of their powers, but Murphy never falls victim to the self loathing that led to Pryor’s slow roll to self-destruction. On the other hand, Pryor recorded taboo-busting and socially insightful stand up and sketch comedy in the seventies and eighties. He issued poignant commentary on race and masculinity in America throughout his career. He slyly championed the labor and civil rights movements in Which Way is Up. Like Bill Cosby before him and Dave Chappelle after, Pryor, in spite of deep personal shortcomings, was not just humorous, he was an emotionally intelligent and revelatory humorist.

By the end of Being Eddie, you come to celebrate that Murphy is a Black man who entered the celebrity meat grinder right out of high school, side-stepped drug and alcohol abuse, pivoted to become a family-friendly brand, and emerged on the other end, intact, to tell the tale. God knows we can use more stories like that. But as Murphy is shown rattling around his mansion, browsing through old magazine clippings, and voicing shadow and hand puppets, you can’t help but sense his muted isolation. For what does it profit a comedian, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his comic soul?

This article appears in the November 20, 2025 edition of the Amsterdam News and is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

This past Sunday night, I bumped into Nick, an old writer friend, at The Sultan Room, a live event venue in the heart of Bushwick. We were there to see the poet/vocalist and actor Saul Williams, one of the handful of 1990s Slam-era spoken-word artists to experience any semblance of mainstream breakout fame. Nick remarked that he had not seen Williams perform in twenty years, and until I caught Williams’ notable turn as Pastor Jedidiah Moore in this year’s blockbuster “Sinners,” it had been a minute since Williams crossed my radar and screen as well.

Time, or maybe timelessness, was the subtext of the evening. Williams’ public poetic output has been sparse over the years, but you’d be off the mark if you referred to his current creative flourish – his recently released graphic novel, “Martyr Loser King,” his spoken word album, “Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople,” and his current tour – as a “comeback.” Williams’ voice and politics have evolved, yet have nonetheless remained fiercely consistent since he was named the Nuyorican Poet Cafe’s Grand Slam Champion in 1996 at the tender age of 24. When you walked into the Sultan Room on Sunday with its multi-generational, multi-racial hipster audience and its ambient psychedelics, it wasn’t clear if it was 1968, 1998, or 2028.

As Williams advised early in his roughly 60-minute set, this wasn’t so much a “concert” as it was a “meeting” in which the proceedings and agenda were “improvised.” Indeed, rather than simply performing the tracks from his recent album, Williams held court. His more formally structured poems were punctuations to what at least felt like extemporaneous meditations, political sermons, and calls to action. His revolutionary subjects and “keywords,” as he called them, included climate exploitation, anti-capitalism, indigenous sovereignty, and anti-colonial resistance.

The most effective moment of the evening was Williams’ history lesson on the first multinational corporation, the Dutch East India Company, and its fifteenth-century colonization of the Lenape-occupied territory, which we now call Manhattan. Williams reminded the audience that Wall Street was named after the actual defensive wall that the Dutch used to keep out the Lenape, thus helping to advance genocide, racialized capitalism, and corporate extraction on these shores. Following this storytelling, Williams’ exhortation to hack colonial oppression invoked Assata Shakur’s famous quote, “And, if I know anything at all/It’s that a wall is just a wall/And nothing more at all/It can be broken down.”

Amen.

Listening to any single artist’s spoken-word cadence for an extended period of time can risk monotony. In particular, if binged, Williams’ rapid and incessant phrasing can threaten to overwhelm and become word salad, with meaning rushing by indistinguishably. But Williams’ adjustments of oratorical tempo and style kept the evening sonically nimble and intellectually stimulating. The accompaniment of the two percussionists (Carlos Niño and Austin Williamson) and the keyboardist (Surya Botofasina) provided a lush and textured soundscape that communicated energy without devolving into simple mood music or musical wallpaper.

Williams’ radical posture as a thrower of lyrical Molotov cocktails will certainly keep him on the pop culture sidelines. And movies like “SlamNation” and “Slam,” which made Williams an artist of the moment, have long dropped out of the zeitgeist. But his clarion call to dismantle fascism and to serve as a “death doula” for the end of empire, has pointed resonance and relevance during this MAGA-haunted fever dream we find ourselves in. Maybe we have it all wrong: Williams never left us in the first place. Perhaps we are the ones returning to him.

This article appears in the October 23, 2025 edition of the Amsterdam News and is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

It’s easy to forget, but for a brief moment in 2024, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was a front-runner in the mayoral contest against the embattled incumbent, Eric Adams. Lander had acquired an impeccable profile as a wonky, but down-to-earth, progressive who was often the smartest white guy in the room. His ascent from Park Slope community development executive director to third-highest ranking New York City official showed Lander to be a highly effective legislator and administrator, a skilled fundraiser, and a formidable campaigner. [Full disclosure: I served as co-chair of Lander’s 2021 NYC Comptroller transition team].

When the race for mayor was first a twinkle in Lander’s eye, October 7th had not yet shifted the political landscape and highlighted his identity as an observant Jew and liberal zionist. By the time he announced his candidacy, he understood that a resurrected Andrew Cuomo was a wild card that would inevitably suck much of the air from the race, but few could have predicted the shooting star known as Zohran Mamdani. Lander’s distant third-place finish in the Democratic primary proved there is no greater consequential factor in politics than timing.

Speculation on the street has it that Lander is now eyeing a high-ranking position in the Mamdani administration or a run for Congress against Rep. Dan Goldman. On the eve of last week’s general election, I sat down with Lander to conduct a post-mortem on his race, examine his complex relationship with Zohran Mamdani, and contemplate the future of his career and of New York City.

Mark Winston Griffith (MWG)

Obviously I’m conducting this interview before the general election, but it will be published after the elections. What are your predictions?

Brad Lander

Well, I’m optimistic that Zohran is going to win. My dream scenario is Zohran gets past 50 percent and Curtis comes in second. I don’t think that’s really going to happen, but I think Zohran will win sizably.

MWG

Interesting. Say more about your hope that Curtis Sliwa comes in second.

Brad Lander

During his campaign, Andrew Cuomo’s worst self was oozing out all over the place. Watching him down the stretch drive of this race resort to fear-mongering, Islamophobia and racism was really gross. And with Donald Trump in the White House, it raised anxiety levels.

Zohran represents generational change and a lot of New Yorkers wouldn’t have imagined they were going to have a Democratic Socialist Muslim mayor. And when Cuomo weaponizes people’s fear and concerns about anti-semitism and Islamophobia, it’s a toxic cocktail.

So in my dream scenario, Curtis Sliwa comes in second, Andrew Cuomo comes in third, and he gets sent back to Westchester on Tuesday night. I will be saying “good riddance.”

MWG

Leading up to the primary, you very prominently campaigned shoulder-to-shoulder with Zohran. And leading up to the general, you’ve been campaigning hard for him, and you’ve been a surrogate for him: A liberal Zionist locking arms with an anti-Zionist. That really shouldn’t be that big of a thing in a mayoral race, right? But it was, and the kind of mutual respect that you two have shown towards each other is rare among political rivals.

So walk me through the hierarchy of considerations that went through your mind as you became such a prominent member of Team Mamdani.

Brad Lander

The first in this hierarchy of rank choice needs was defeating Andrew Cuomo.

Four years ago, if Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley had cross-endorsed each other, one of them would have won and we never would have had this whole timeline with Eric Adams selling us out to Turkey and then to Trump.

And when I entered the race, I made it clear, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to fight to be elected mayor, but I’m going to be a strategic participant in rank choice so that we don’t wind up with either Eric Adams or Andrew Cuomo.

As I headed down the stretch, it was clear that Zohran was a candidate among the alternatives who had a chance to beat Andrew Cuomo. He’s for building the city we want. If you look deeply into Zohran’s campaign, it’s the kind of politics that I like to participate in. There was a hopeful energy. All these kids knocking doors and volunteering from every corner of the city is exciting. So it was clear to me that the right thing to do was to make a cross-endorsement to make sure someone could beat Andrew.

But then something else really nice happened. Rather than just feeling like rank choice mathematics, it felt like solidarity. People were so inspired by the cross-endorsement and just the simple idea that politics doesn’t have to be this selfish, sour, ego trip of Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams or Donald Trump. It’s so common to have this kind of “my way or the highway,” so people recognized that, wow, politics could instead be a team sport.

And then third, yes, there was this dynamic of having a Muslim candidate and a Jewish candidate campaign together and support each other at a time when that has become harder. It has never been easy, but boy, since October 7th, it’s much harder.

That was always going to be an issue. When I entered the race in July of last year, the first story the New York Times ran was that I was going to have a problem because my Israel politics were too far to the left. No one would have dreamed at that moment that an anti-Zionist candidate would be able to build a majority.

Look, Zohran and I don’t agree on everything about Israel and Palestine. But I do think the best possibility for safety and freedom for all Israelis and Palestinians, for everybody between the river and the sea, is some kind of mutual recognition where there’s an Israel and a Palestine, and that they find a way to recognize each other’s humanity, stop killing each other, and make sure everyone has self-determination, freedom and safety.

I don’t have to solve that problem, but I care about it a lot, as Zohran does. It matters a lot to New Yorkers, especially when our tax dollars have been paying for the bombs that Israel has been dropping on Gaza. I think what Zohran and I were able to do together is say, “You ought to care about everybody’s humanity and that means you want everyone to be safe in New York City no matter their religion, no matter their politics.”

MWG

What political price have you had to pay in Jewish circles by supporting Mamdani?

Brad Lander

I’m used to it. I get called a “kapo” [a slur for a Jew who betrays his own] by a bunch of Jews and I get sneered at for being a zionist by folks who are for Palestinian freedom.

The most important Jewish value to me is “b’tzelem elohim,” that everybody is created equally in God’s image. I fight fiercely for my people, and I fight fiercely for that value that we’re called on to treat all people like they’re created in God’s image. So yes, there’s no doubt that the cross-endorsement, and my continued support for Zohran has cost me support amongst Jews who might previously have said, “Oh, I’m proud of that guy who’s the highest ranking Jewish elected official and is doing a good job managing the pension.” But if you weren’t existentially concerned about what Donald Trump is doing to American democracy, what a threat he is to American Jews and to safety of all people all around the world, I have a hard time taking seriously when you can say Zohran is an existential threat when he’s made very clear, he’s gonna work hard to keep Jews safe and increase resources to fight anti-Semitism and hate crimes. Before he was running for mayor, Zohran wasn’t the guy who would have said, “You want a NYPD car outside your synagogue? I’ll get it for you.” He is now.

MWG

Well, given the state of the world right now, and particularly the ugliness that you’ve already talked about, and that we witnessed this political season, what kind of Jewish leadership do you believe is needed right now in New York City?

Brad Lander

Big shout out to Rabbi Rachel Tomoner at Congregation Beth Elohim, who invited all three mayoral candidates to an event with her congregants to say, “How are we going to listen and talk to each other across lines of difference?”

I’ve been blessed to have such amazing rabbis, people who won’t compromise on anybody’s humanity, people who care about the safety and the traditions of Jews and Jewish New Yorkers, but who recognize that the story right now of asylum seekers is a Jewish story.

So when we go down to 26th Federal Plaza [federal immigration court] to fight for our neighbors, it’s not only that we wake up every day in the city with the copper plated Statue [of Liberty] in the harbor, it’s that those are Jewish words on its base. [The poem, The New Colossus by American-Jewish poet Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”]

Jewish leadership at this moment is an openness to healing as we have our first Muslim mayor. It’s fair to ask him to affirm he’s going to keep us safe, but it’s on us also to reach out and recognize there are a million Muslim New Yorkers. What are we doing to make sure that they feel safe? Just like we want help to fight anti-Semitism, are we showing up to fight Islamophobia? Jews are going to be safest amidst real inclusive multiracial democracy. That’s how our kids will be able to afford homes and childcare. It’s how the city can be what it’s been for us, but also what it has to be for everyone.

My other favorite Jewish line from our teachings is from Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers: “If I’m not for myself, then who’s going to be for me? But if I’m only for myself, what am I?”

That’s what we’re called to be. And that’s the kind of Jewish leadership that we need right at this moment.

MWG

I want to pivot to talking about you. You and I have known each other for decades and we both ran for different city council seats in 2009, but you actually won your race. And until this past primary, you had won every race you had been in since. I believe losing is actually an opportunity to grow. What would you say you’ve learned about yourself when you didn’t win this time?

Brad Lander

Well, first I want to take you back to a time before our city council races, because we met when we were both folks doing community development work, trying to create opportunities for hardworking families in New York.

And politics, unfortunately, gets a brand, as being about people’s egos. Luckily, there’s so many people doing the work to organize their neighbors and build community together. That was how I thought about my 15-year career in community development. That’s why I ran for city council and comptroller. You wake up every morning, you know, you go out and fight different fights sometimes.

I spent the last year and the better part of $8 million to unsuccessfully get anyone’s attention. And then down the stretch, you know, I endorsed another candidate for the race, got arrested [by ICE] and came in a distant third. And now all of a sudden, everyone’s like, hey, I want to take a selfie with you.

MWG

That’s funny.

Brad Lander

Life is peculiar, but I really think it just speaks to that core set of values. Like what a blessing it is to be a Jew in New York City after 2000 years of having the crap kicked out of us all around the world, to have this place where we can thrive by fighting together for inclusive multiracial democracy. That same story is true for people from the Caribbean, from Muslim countries and from Asia and from Italy and Ireland and now this whole new generation of immigrants and asylum seekers.

I don’t wake up any day wishing I had run for re-election as New York City Comptroller. I’d be sailing to that re-election, but I feel so much better having taken some risks for the things I care about.

MWG

So what’s next? Are you interested in serving in a Mamdani administration if he wins? And if so, what would be your dream job in it?

Brad Lander

So I’m still weighing my options, and of course. I love working together with people and serving and fighting for the city and the values we care about.

If there’s a role doing that in a Mamdani administration, I’m open to it. But if there’s a role continuing to aim for elective office and serve in that way, I’m open to that as well.

I’m thinking about my options and I’ll have more to say in the next couple of weeks. I think Zohran and the values that he’s representing will need champions at a lot of levels. He’s going to need help in Albany to win the childcare. And boy, we need more voices in Congress who share that set of values as we think about the future of this democracy, stand up to Trump, stand up for our neighbors, and think about our place in the world.

By one measure, The Perfect Neighbor, a documentary directed and produced by Geeta Gandbhir, tells a simple story. It recounts the events that led to the June 2023 fatal shooting of Ajike “AJ” Owens, a 35-year-old Black mother of four, at the hands of Susan Lorincz, a 58-year-old white woman, in Ocala, Florida. After opening with that lethal moment, The Perfect Neighbor returns to tell the story in chronological order, with sparse commentary and no filmmaker narration.

In fact, with perhaps one notable exception, the film provides few surprises. In the first half of the film, each scene looks like the last: Susan calls the police and complains that the (mostly Black) kids on the block are trespassing on her property and acting like “animals.” The police attempt to mediate, quickly surmise that Susan is an ornery crank, and then leave after determining there is nothing they can do. Rinse and repeat. To the extent there is any humor to be found in this tragic tale, the kids on the block who are the objects of Susan’s ire don’t even bother to call her “Susan” anymore. They simply refer to her as “The Karen.”

The second half of the film features the grief that is left in the wake of AJ’s killing and the efforts to hold Susan to account. Susan is her own worst enemy and makes for an easy villain. Even in her most pitiful moments, sitting alone and condemned in an interrogation room, she never rises above being an ignorant racist who has taken her profound intolerance, un-neighborliness, and white privilege to an extreme end.

The conceit of The Perfect Neighbor is that it employs a near-total reliance on found footage from surveillance technology — police body cameras, Ring cameras, CCTV, and police interrogation room recordings — which makes the viewing experience crude, but simultaneously inventive and compelling. But The Perfect Neighbor actually has something to say, and what could have easily been a film in the spirit of Cops that casually exploits the lives of Americans in distress, is instead a stress test of American race relations and 21st century gun culture.

On the other hand, The Perfect Neighbor could be construed as an act of police blotter journalism - “just the facts, m’am” - so there is no opportunity to learn anything about AJ’s life or Susan, much less anything about the community or other families in the film, outside this unfortunate series of events. They are crime statistics and story-telling fodder, but never humans with their own complex histories, which serves to add its own element of exploitation.

If there is any unpredictability to be found in the story, it’s that, at first, this seems to be yet another demoralizing anecdote about a racist homicide that the American criminal justice system legitimizes as “self defense.” But the film eventually pivots to an observation of Florida’s use of its Stand Your Ground law, which holds that if a person “reasonably” fears death or bodily harm, they are not required to retreat and are legally justified to use deadly force. Florida’s 2005 statute inspired similar laws in other states across the country, and in 2012 it was notoriously used by George Zimmerman in his defense of his fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, thus legally codifying the idea that Black bodies are objects of threat and menace. Of course, Trayvon’s killing went on to prompt the modern Black Lives Matter movement.

Perhaps even more than the protests that apparently push the police to prosecute Susan, what seems to ultimately do her in is that she is an equal opportunity offender. Even the white officers in this southern sheriff’s department who haul in Susan don’t seem to like her or appreciate her incessant and frivolous 911 calls. If The Perfect Neighbor, in the years since the egregiously immoral acquittal of Zimmerman, gives us any hope that the arc of the universe bends towards justice, it also reminds us just how fickle, arbitrary, and unreliable the promise of that justice continues to be.

This article appears in the November 6, 2025 edition of the Amsterdam News and is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

If Zohran Mamdani, according to the demographic breakdown of the Democratic party primary, is struggling to win over Black voters in advance of the New York City general elections, it wasn’t immediately obvious on one particular sunny day on Nostrand Avenue, in the heart of largely Caribbean central Brooklyn. As Rep. Yvette Clarke — accompanied by local, state, and city-wide Black elected officials — formally announced her endorsement of Mamdani, passing drivers excitedly honked their horns and pedestrians walked by with approving smiles.

But this was September, less than two months before the general election, and Clarke’s late-hour endorsement reflected an ambivalence that older, mainstream, and moderate Black Democratic Party leaders have shown towards Mamdani’s candidacy since he first entered the race. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries got around to endorsing Mamdani on Oct. 24 — just last week.

An analysis from The New York Times reported that in neighborhoods where more than four out of five people are Black, Mamdani received less than 30 percent of the vote. And in a blow to Mamdani’s claim that he speaks to the interests of economically struggling New Yorkers facing displacement, Mamdani won two-thirds of the vote in the neighborhoods where the Black population decreased the fastest between the 2010 and 2020 censuses.

Some of Mamdani’s policies, or at least distortions of them in the press, have shaken Black middle class voters. For instance, some Black elected officials who support Mamdani have expressed frustration that many of their Black home-owning constituents believe Mamdani is going to “take away their homes.” Meanwhile, organizers from Mamdani’s political base, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), have a reputation for targeting and running candidates against Black Democratic party incumbents and accusing them of selling out their constituents to corporate interests. In turn, Black Democratic party regulars often refer to DSA as a cabal of radically left, anti-Black, gentrifiers.

These data points, however, obscure a more complicated story. For instance, an exit poll by Vera Action showed that more than 70% of Black voters under the age of 50 voted for Mamdani. And Mamdani’s main competitor, Andrew Cuomo, is the beneficiary of Mario Cuomo’s legacy, which has enjoyed the loyalty of Black voters for generations.

In order to make better sense of all of this, I spoke to Zohran Mamdani last week while he was on his way to a mosque in the Bronx to make a major address to condemn Islamophobia.

Mark Winston Griffith (MWG) for the Amsterdam News: As a Democratic Socialist, do you get frustrated when people focus so much on race instead of class? Do you feel as though there’s a deep enough understanding of how class works in New York City among policymakers and pundits alike?

Zohran Mamdani: I never get frustrated by a discussion of race, and that’s in part because of the phrase I’ve heard often: When America catches a cold, Black America catches pneumonia.

The affordability crisis that I speak of as a universal crisis across New York City is one that has a disproportionate impact on Black New Yorkers.

I say that as we are living through what has effectively become the reverse Great Migration, where our city has lost 200,000 Black residents in the last few decades alone.

And it is an impact that we are feeling across the five boroughs, and is generationally specific. From 2010 to 2019, this city lost 19% of its population of Black children and teenagers, and to actually tackle this affordability crisis means also tackling the displacement that has been taking place for the last few decades.

MWG: You’ve been famously walking around the city and talking to thousands of folks. What would you say you’ve learned the most about the lives of Black folks in this city that you didn’t necessarily know before?

Mamdani: I think of a grandmother I spoke to at a senior center in Brownsville. She came up to me and told me that she’d been on the waiting list for eight years for senior housing.

And she told me she could not afford to wait any longer and that if she couldn’t get senior housing in the next few years she was going to leave this city.

And so often when I speak about the agenda that we have, the ambition at the heart of it is to actually match the scale of the crisis in front of us. I hear from other politicians about what we cannot afford. And they often speak about us not being able to afford to raise taxes on their donors. And yet what they lose sight of is that New Yorkers already can’t afford this city and that’s inaccessible.

I went to Mother Zion AME Church in Harlem. The pastor there told me to look out onto the pews. He said, you see how few people are here today for service? He said, it’s not because they don’t love Harlem or they don’t love New York City. They left because they couldn’t afford this city. And a lot of them now live in South Carolina.

And I’ll meet pastors who themselves have been priced out of this city. There was a pastor who opened his doors of his church for a meeting with faith leaders and myself in Brooklyn. And as he walked in, he mentioned just by chance that he had driven two and a half hours to get here from his home.

For all of this discussion of whether billionaires will leave if we increase their personal income taxes by 2%, it loses sight of the fact that working-class New Yorkers are already leaving. The question is not whether or not we’ll have displacement; the question is whether we’re willing to stop it.

MWG: There are a lot of Black people of a certain age who connect with you through your mother’s (Mira Nair) 1991 film, “Mississippi Masala.”

Mamdani: Great film.

MWG: I agree. And it tackles some pretty complicated social and economic tensions between Black and Brown people, specifically immigrant Brown people.

So I know you’ve experienced a complicated relationship with Black voters as you’ve been campaigning over the past year, that is not just informed by the fact that you’re of Indian descent, but that you’re also an immigrant and identify as such.

So what do you think is the most challenging barrier and communication between people who identify as Black and African American and those in New York who are one or two generations removed from a life in South Asia, or in your case, Uganda?

Mamdani: I think the history of what so many older Black New Yorkers have had to live through in this city and in this country is one that is critical to understanding whenever I’ve been met with any skepticism or questions as to our agenda.

And I say that because I know that I’m speaking to so many New Yorkers who have lived through so many promises from politicians, lived through much hope of a different life in an improved city, only to have been let down and to have been betrayed time and again.

And in understanding that history, you can begin to understand that skepticism. And I was proud to have won the support of a majority of young Black voters in the primary.

And so a recognition of the fact that we had more work to do with older Black voters and much of that work to me is also the work of introducing myself, because of what I recall when meeting with a pastor. In the primary, we sat down at his church, he endorsed Andrew Cuomo, and I asked him why, and he said, “I endorse Mario’s son.”

And he was referring to Andrew Cuomo’s father, whose name continues to carry a legacy for many New Yorkers, especially among many older Black New Yorkers.

And I did not begrudge the association. I know that my job, however, is to earn support by introducing myself as I am.

I also know that young Black voters have been critical to making that case because I’ve met many older Black voters in the last few months who’ve told me it’s their son, their daughter, their niece, their nephew, their grandchild, who introduced them to this campaign and explained that it is a campaign that seeks to finally deliver on so much of what has been spoken about for so long.

And even though there is such a temptation in our politics to describe everything as if it is the first, as if it exists in isolation, without any precedent, I’ve also appreciated the opportunity to explain how my identity as a Democratic Socialist is also one that is following the example of the first DSA member to have been elected mayor of New York City, David Dinkins, who famously said, in the tradition of democratic socialism, that the accident of birth must never condemn a human being to poverty, sickness or lack of hope, and that it is part of a much longer struggle for dignity than is often understood in this city’s politics.

MWG: I’m going to ask this again and remove the factor of Cuomo and your candidacy and just talk about the relationship between ordinary people in this city. Again, where do you see the gaps in terms of politics and communication between Black folks and Brown immigrants in this city? Obviously, these are not monoliths of people, but there is undeniably a tension. I’m curious, what kind of insight have you come away with, as you’ve been walking this city?

Mamdani: I think a lot of this comes back to if you’re willing to do the work of actually making the case yourself, as opposed to believing the typical political impulse that you are owed that support.

I am not owed anything by any New Yorker. I have to earn their support. And earning their support means going to them to make the case directly.

And so it has been truly a pleasure to not only continue the church outreach that we did over the course of the primary, but in fact to double it and sometimes triple it, where church is no longer just on Sundays, it’s also on Saturday mornings with Seventh-day Adventists.

You know, when you’re speaking about the importance of tackling social justice, making it clear that without the inclusion of economic justice, it is akin, as has been said, to clapping with one hand.

I visited Cornerstone Baptist Church recently, understanding the deep history of the civil rights movement in this city, such that when I quote Martin Luther King, Jr. when he said, “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger,” I’m also quoting a man who in 1958, after having been stabbed, recovered in the parsonage of the very church that I was in.

And I think there is also the recognition that, as a Brown immigrant in this city, there is also an understanding that the struggles of fulfilling a vision of democracy that is true to its ideals is a struggle that existed long before I came to this.

And it’s a struggle that Black New Yorkers have been on the front lines of far longer than I’ve ever thought of the word “democracy.”

MWG: You’ve been known for your big ideas, and many people have attacked you and these ideas for being unrealistic and unachievable, and for trotting out slogans.

And at the same time, critics relentlessly talk about how dangerous it is that you’re a Democratic Socialist.

So my question sort of falls in between. How far can socialism even go in New York City, which is arguably the capital of capitalism?

Rent freezes, free buses, universal childcare — those things are hard enough, but are you actually looking to disrupt and change the direction of the economic and social order of this city, and in four years no less?

Mamdani: My intent is to deliver on a politics that I have described as Democratic Socialist because it is a politics that believes in the dignity of each and every New Yorker and the responsibility the city government has to deliver that dignity.

And as you said, the deliverance of it is not simply a question of fast and free buses or universal childcare or rent freeze, but it’s a continued fight for that which is necessary for New Yorkers to live a dignified life in the city.

And I’m confident, frankly, because of the fact that there are so many more New Yorkers who are in the struggle for those same things, who may not describe themselves in the same way.

And what I’ve often found in my conversations with New New Yorkers is they don’t tend to ask me how to describe my politics. They ask me if my politics includes them and what I’ve told them is, not only do my politics include them, [but] it’s in fact defined by them and their struggles. It was an older Black woman on the Bx33 who told me a few years ago, “I used to love New York, now it’s just where I live.”

That’s an example of how this city has taken so many people for granted, especially working-class New Yorkers. And that the time is now to deliver on this because, without it, what we are going to see is that these same New Yorkers are going to start to live elsewhere in this same country.

MWG: I just want to express my sympathies and horror for all the Islamophobia that you’ve been faced with recently.. How are you personally doing? What are your takeaways in this moment?

Mamdani: It has been a truly disgusting past 48 hours of this race, where the naked embrace of Islamophobia, bigotry, and racism has reared its head from a former governor, a current mayor, and their billionaire donors. Andrew Cuomo made an AI video mocking me for eating with my hands while featuring Black men as pimps and criminals.

He told a right wing radio show host who called me an animal that he’d have concerns if I were to lead the city in another 9/11 when the host said that I would cheer it. Andrew Cuomo laughed and agreed. And all this while his billionaire donors are funding ads claiming that I’m going to support global jihad in this city.

And it’s both shocking and unsurprising because this is the kind of racism, especially towards Muslims, that has become so endemic in our politics that it is not even exclusive to one party.

And today, I’m actually en route to deliver an address outside of a mosque in the Bronx on not only what I have faced, but frankly, the glimpse that it gives into what so many Muslims face on a daily basis.

Facing this kind of indignity in the shadows, being told again and again that we do not belong in the city that is our home, and being subject to a vision of this city that grows only narrower in terms of whom it seeks to serve. All of this amidst a moment when what we need the most is a universal understanding of not only belonging, but who this city must serve.

An edited version of this article appears in the October 30, 2025 edition of the Amsterdam News and is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

“‘All of the above’ is not an answer.” Such is the love advice issued by the monogamously married, but restless Alan (Roy Wood Jr.) to his best friend, Roger (Andre Holland), the central character in Love, Brooklyn, directed by Rachael Abigail Holder and written by Paul Zimmerman. Alan’s words come as a gentle scolding to Roger, a writer living in Bedford-Stuyvesant who is a part of a situationship triangle with two women. Like a diner reviewing a menu, Roger can’t (or won’t) settle on a main course. This brain fog extends to his work: He’s on a publishing deadline and can’t move beyond his writer’s block long enough to capture his mixed emotions about gentrified Brooklyn.

It’s not entirely clear if Roger is in love with his ex-girlfriend Casey (Nicole Beharie) and/or the booty-calling Nicole (DeWanda Wise), a recently widowed single mother, but he is at least hung up on them. And, though the film suggests that these two women are in transitional moments in their lives and don’t know what they want long enough to give Roger clear signals, it soon becomes clear that Roger is as tentative as they are. They may be playing him, but homeboy is also playing himself.

These three Black and Lovelies stroll through parks and museums and flash disarming smiles, but a lot of the flirtatious play that is supposed to pass as chemistry feels unconvincing. On the other hand, in a cinematic world that traffics casually in formulaic heterosexual relationships, it’s refreshing to see over-thirty-five-year-olds blurring the lines of intimacy and friendship without inevitably working up a head of steam toward marriage. Alan and his wife are the obligatory married couple tossed into the story as a point of contrast, but ultimately, Roger, Casey, and Nicole are, despite their profound loneliness, quite settled in their single status. Owing more to the strong performances of Beharie and Wise than the writing, we find a sufficient amount of emotional nuance between them, but only Nicole is provided a backstory that explains why she is so commitment-averse.

To say the streets of Brooklyn are a singular character in the film, or that the central love affair in the movie is between the filmmaker and the borough, names the obvious. Anyone who knows central Brooklyn will find themselves playing “name that landmark” as the camera follows Roger wistfully on his bike down the streets of the neighborhoods surrounding Bed-Stuy. This selective scan of brownstone architecture, as well as scenes of comfortable cafes and tastefully furnished interiors, represent a tunnel vision that serves to affirm the charm of brownstone Brooklyn. Holder’s tender varnish on buppie life is reminiscent of 1990’s neo-soul films like Strictly Business, Boomerang, and Love Jones that were designed to provide a counter-narrative to the white romance and material success that otherwise dominate the big screen.

Love, Brooklyn is not only a cultural throwback, but the way it references gentrification in historically Black Brooklyn feels a bit late to the conversation. It’s so… 2015. Like most treatments of generational displacement and neighborhood change you find in popular culture, Roger has only the most superficial of insights to offer, while being oblivious to how he is a driver and agent of the “new” Brooklyn himself.

Love, Brooklyn is now available for streaming. It did the film festival circuit and was on a limited run in theaters this past summer, but audiences were treated to free screenings in the park in Brooklyn as well. This is where this earnest and reverential film can be best appreciated, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with your long-term and recently-arrived neighbors alike, in Brower, Von King, Fort Greene, or Lincoln Terrace Parks, surrounded by the beauty and contradictions of this hallowed ground, Black Brooklyn.

This article appears in the October 2, 2025 edition of the Amsterdam News and is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

Like the American political war zone we currently live in, there is plenty to divide us in One Battle After Another, the rollicking and provocative new feature produced, written and directed by auteur Paul Thomas Anderson and inspired by the Thomas Phynchon novel, Vineland. Set in present day California, the cold opening is the first of several set-it-off moments in which an armed group, the French 75, liberates hundreds of migrants from a detention camp overseen by the American military. It’s a stunning visual. Through the rockets’ red glare, and bombs bursting in air, both French 75 and Anderson ostentatiously announce their subversive intentions.

If you consider yourself a member of the radical left, you could easily find the depictions of the French 75 insulting and problematic, especially in Anderson’s portrayal of Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a charismatic, but profoundly conflicted and reckless field general in the French 75. On the other hand, if you find comfort in the abduction of immigrants and the easy designation of far-left activism as “terrorism,” you may not be able to stomach your movie popcorn and Skittles for more than five minutes. From start to finish, Anderson provides an uproariously satirical takedown of white supremacy and the fascist cabal it rode in on.

The first act of One Battle consists of a series of episodic successes for French 75 as it burns and slashes its way through government and corporate infrastructure. Helping to bring the heat, literally, is “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), aka Bob, French 75’s ass-dragging bomb specialist and Perfidia’s lover. The eventual infiltration and demise of French 75 is set in motion by military commander Steven J. Slackjaw (Sean Penn), who is forged in the tradition of cinema’s finest military charactonyms like Dr. Strangelove’s Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, Apocalypse Now’s Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore and Monster vs. Aliens’ General W.R. Monger.

Anderson’s view of the American fascist landscape is comically satisfying and eerily prescient, but what he has to say about the resistance is more layered and engaging. When the second act resumes 16 years later, Bob is a hapless burnout and a wobbly single parent to his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). French 75 has been driven underground and what’s left of it is a rag tag network of still-true believers – conspiracy theorists whose conspiracies are all too real. The Battle of Algiers and Gil Scott-Heron are their antiquated cultural touchstones and the recitation of Heron’s 1971 mockingly classic call-to-action, "The Revolution Will Not be Televised,” is their secret handshake. Their guerilla defenses are as dated and threadbare as they are rebel chic. In what becomes a running gag, French 75’s efforts to evade high tech, highly militarized surveillance reach absurd proportions as Bob hilariously tries to find his way out of the fog of a lifetime of substance abuse long enough to deliver the right password to an over-zealous comrade.

The Christmas Adventurers Club, a ridiculously goofy secret society of the whitest--of-white supremacists, might be considered the other side of the extremist coin, but Anderson doesn’t lazily create false equivalents between the Christmas Adventurers and the French 75. There is nothing symmetrical about their morality. For all their hippy-dippy amateurism and self-sabotage, the French 75’s code of ethics and moral grounding provide their only tactical advantage.

French 75 is a group of mostly non-Latino activists who still have the meager first world means to deliver migrants from the clutches of modern-day slave catchers. But it’s the dispossessed Latino migrants of the Baktan Cross community, and their underground railroad conductor, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Bernicio del Toro), who deliver themselves – and eventually Bob – from daily siege and predation with cool ingenuity. In perhaps the film’s most visually lyrical scene, the silhouettes of three Baktan Cross skateboarders glide across rooftops as they try to lead Bob and his lumbering white butt to safety. Against the power of a bloated empire, necessity is the mother of invention and efficient resilience.

Anderson’s riskiest take in One Battle is his hyper-sexualization of Black women members of French 75, Perfidia and Jungle Pussy. Teyana Taylor’s physicality seizes complete control of the screen and her character Perfidia deploys Black woman magic like a heat-seeking missile. As wartime lore has it, danger is an aphrodisiac and sex is a method of escaping anxiety in intimate insurgent spaces. 60’s and 70’s formations like the Black Liberation Army, the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground are steeped in sexual mythology. Huey Newton and Angela Davis were not just revolutionary icons, but leather-clad, afro-flexing sex symbols. In this way, Perfidia’s sexual exploits with white men, and Bob and Slackjaw’s shared fetishization of her sexuality, come to represent Perfidia’s power as well as the discomforting exoticization and objectification of her body.

Judging by the buzz One Battle has received, it is destined for a slew of Oscar nominations. Like a delirious joy ride in a stolen car, One Battle is full of thrills and guilty pleasures that barrel down the road with manic abandon. This is easily Sean Penn’s best role and performance in years. And while Leonardo DiCaprio is the Hollywood headliner, Bernicio del Toro quietly steals the show from Leo whenever they share the screen, as does Teyana Taylor. The riveting star power that Taylor promised in One Thousand and One is confidently and undeniably fulfilled in One Battle. The only disappointment is that she doesn’t spend more time on screen.

One Battle is a movie for this moment. It reminds us that while politics and movements are performative, their stakes are real. The members of French 75 are literally chased down like dogs in the street and spend down on social change with their lives. For those of us who fancy ourselves freedom fighters, while carrying mortgages, Costco memberships and Martha’s Vineyard getaways, we have to consider the true cost of successfully disrupting capitalism and state power. How much are we willing to sacrifice? How much coercion and intimidation can we withstand? And under the current government, how much obliteration of our rights are we willing to endure before we move to not simply resist, but overthrow? As Gil Scott-Heron taught us, the revolution won’t be televised, much less on the movie screen or Insta. Nah y’all, the revolution will be live.

This article appears in the October 10, 2025 edition of the Amsterdam News and is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.

The 77th Emmy Awards will be held September 14 and broadcast on CBS and Paramount +. Chances are, you haven’t seen all of the nominated productions, so think of me as your friendly neighborhood guide to 2025 television achievement. Or in some cases, underachievement.

On August 14, I began the gradual release of my ranked choices of the nominees, from my least favorite to my most favorite, in four marquee categories: Outstanding Television Movie; Outstanding Limited Or Anthology Series; Outstanding Comedy Series; and Outstanding Drama Series. This is my final entry.

These choices are NOT predictions of what will win, nor am I trying to tell you what is the objectively “best” television film or series, just my personal favorites. Hopefully, reading these mini reviews will simply help you be a more informed and discerning viewer.

This week: Outstanding Drama Series

8. Paradise

From the mind of Dan Fogelman, the creator of This Is Us, comes the dystopian thriller Paradise. The title is an ironic take on the show’s premise: An underground bunker universe serving as an alternative home for the survivors of a doomsday event is gradually revealed to be anything but utopian. Sterling K. Brown stars as Xavier Davis, a secret service agent assigned to body the U.S. President (James Marsden). When the President is mysteriously murdered, Davis pulls back the curtain on the sham promised land that is shadow-governed by gazillionaire Samantha Redmon (Julianne Nicholson, who makes evil look fun). And the harder Davis tugs on the curtain, the more conspiracies are laid bare.

Paradise has the dubious distinction of being the most TV network-like of all the Emmy nominees. Maybe it’s the Shonda Rhimes-esque vibe, the implausibly good-looking cast members, or the less-than-convincing plot progressions. Ultimately, Paradise is entertaining enough, but despite its intriguing premise, rarely does it feel fresh or imaginatively conceived.

7. The White Lotus

The White Lotus has become enough of a cultural phenomena that it requires little introduction: Each season, like an R-rated Fantasy Island, it follows the vacation exploits of privileged, mostly white, Americans acting badly against the backdrop of an exotic waterside resort. Each season begins with the revelation of a death among one of them and we spend the subsequent episodes following the chain of events, sexual exploits, and substance abuses that got us there.

The first season, set in Hawaii, was a pretty fun and novel romp. The second season, set in Italy, was arguably the most twisty, titillating, and perceptive of human nature. But now in its third season, this time set in Thailand, the character types and relationships are starting to repeat themselves and feel stock: The Young, Oversexed Toxic Male; the Dysfunctional Family; the Co-dependent and Emotionally Abusive Heterosexual Couple; and the Fraying Friend Group. The locals may not be as routinely screwed up as the tourists, but they also rarely achieve as high a level of humanity. There are caricatures of wealth and white fragility, but the show also can’t help but drape non-white culture in mystical otherness.

Every guest has a one-note anxiety. For example, Rich (Walter Goggins) amplifies an obsession with avenging his father’s death in every scene he’s in. Similarly, Tim (Jason Isaacs) spends the entire season in self anesthetized fear about the revelation of his criminal activities. Rather than draw his characters with three dimensions or with anything resembling empathy, Mike White, the series creator, approaches them with simple derision. No doubt, our world is overpopulated with despicable people, but White apparently found the least interesting among them to put on screen. And by providing little insight into how these people got to be such jerks, the entertainment value offered by season three is little more than privilege porn.

6. The Pitt

Along with cop shows, hospital dramas are one of the most abused formulas in television. No matter what the setting, we are sure to find talented and morally high-grounded doctors, corporate suits demanding profits, and lots of people looking mighty fine in their scrubs. Meanwhile, there’s always enough medical jargon flying fast and more furiously than you can shake a stethoscope at.

The Pitt’s conceit is that it plays out in real time. Each episode is an hour within a high-intensity, 15-hour shift in the emergency department of the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. And in this premier season, the senior attending physician, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle), is having the baddest of bad days. Barely minutes into the first episode we learn he’s coping with the anniversary of the death of his mentor who succumbed to COVID years ealier. And the day goes downhill from there.

Because the entire season takes place in the course of a single day, it doesn’t have the luxury of extensive on-air backstories or deep character development. In true hospital drama form, we confront a range of medical ethics issues, as well as explicit race, gender, and sexual orientation matters that are, subtly in this case, taken from today’s culture wars. Meanwhile, we witness several heart attacks, a child drowning, drug overdoses, child abuse, a full body burn victim, sex trafficking, fist fights, and the theft of an ambulance. And that’s just among the patients. The doctors are involved in an arrest, assault, drug theft, homicide, and a miscarriage. And if those weren’t enough, there is a mass shooting that brings more than a hundred dead and injured to the hospital, turning it into a de facto M.A.S.H. unit and morgue. Like I said, all this happens in one shift.

The Pitt is essentially a love letter honoring the commitment and sacrifice demonstrated by of those who do daily trauma care, which by definition means the show can’t avoid superhero tropes. Doctor Robby proves not only to be a talented and compassionate doctor, but the character still manages to be a highly relatable human being. As a result, Wyle is the undeniable pulsating heart of the show. He and Katherine LaNasa, who plays the Charge Nurse, Dana Evans, log the most consistently mature and layered performances. The rest of the cast is fine enough, but some of the actors who portray the patients in The Pitt and in other hospital dramas make you wonder if overacting is written into their union contracts.

If you are newly initiated in hospital dramas, you will find The Pitt riveting, and the final scenes, poignant. But if you’re like me and have watched several decades and hundreds of episodes worth of hospital and ER shows on network television, you may have a hard time finding high doses of originality. For the record, if I see another television doctor giving chest compressions long after the patient has proven to be unrevivable, with colleagues standing by with futility in their eyes; or if another patient and their family (literally and figuratively) spill their guts and share the intimate details of their lives and beliefs with doctors they met seconds before, I swear I will gnash my teeth on my remote.

5. Slow Horses

Like The Pitt, Slow Horses has to work uphill against the clichés of an over-tread television genre. In this case, it’s the cop show, more specifically, the spy thriller subgenre. Slow Horses, based on the Slough House novels by Mick Herron, is set in London and follows a group of MI5 agents exiled to a broken down spy annex called Slough House. These outcasts are led by the brilliant Jackson Lamb (Sir Gary Oldman) who just may be the most jerkish and slovenly cretin to ever foul the world of espionage. Not a day goes by that Lamb is not gratuitously farting up an enclosed space and disrespecting everyone he comes in contact with. Think Columbo meets Oscar the Grouch meets an unrestrained barnyard animal.

One of the most fun aspects of Slow Horses is all the spy jargon and gritty intelligence gathering on display. And yet with all the high-tech gadgetry, transnational intrigue and CCTV surveillance, the most sophisticated spy craft seems to always get reduced to people secretly tailing one another on foot. And while the show is premised on the idea that the Slough House crew is made up of incompetent screw ups, they consistently outpace, outsmart, and outgun their supposed elite colleagues working out of the posh MI5 headquarters known internally as “The Park.”

Season four has the heroic, talented, but always out-of-his depth, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) investigating the attempted assassination of his grandfather, David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce). Oldman delivers yet another tour de force performance while creating one of the most indelible crimefighting anti-heroes in recent memory. Oldman is surrounded by a stellar supporting cast who keep you rooting for their characters long enough to make you forget how preposterous the action is. Slow Horses? Given the extreme body count among the operatives, it feels more like perpetually Slain Horses.

4. Andor

Unless you are a Comic-Com regular, you would be justified to approach the latest addition to the Star Wars cannon with trepidation. Did we really need another prequel to “long time ago in a galaxy far, far away?” How long can this franchise run off the fumes of the 1977 film and fandom?

I don’t have answers to these and life’s other vexing questions, but I can at least tell you that Andor — which gives us the backstory of Cassian Andor’s road from thief to rebel spy, as introduced to us in the 2016 film, Rogue One — is cut from a surprisingly different cloth than other “Star Wars” properties, especially considering its Disney parentage.

Yes, there are still silly gunfights and goofy creatures promenading the galaxy. And the supposedly elite, white-helmeted, stormtroopers inexplicably remain the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. But what makes Andor worth watching is that it’s a less-than-glamorous take on the process of revolution building, the sacrifices that come with political radicalization, and the moral compromises made on the road to being a true believer. Instead of an unambiguous struggle between good vs. evil, there are shades of righteousness and ill intent. The Empire and rebellion combatants are more separated by the side of the tracks they were born to than a team honor code. And the Empire’s moral corruption is inspired less by abject evil than by the drunkenness of unfettered power.

Diego Luna stars as Cassian Andor. Luna doesn’t always make for the most convincing rebel swashbuckler, but the other members of the cast more than prop him up, namely Denise Gough as a blindly ambitious member of the Imperial Security Bureau; Kyle Sollar as a security services officer who has sipped the Kool Aide and is obsessed with finding Andor; and Stellan Skarsgård as the flawed but catalytic mastermind behind the resistance.

The action in the Star Wars franchise has always occurred light years away, but the politics felt far removed as well. In Andor, there is little of The Force’s hocus pocus, while the Empire’s oppression feels closer to home and more familiar. The Empire is reminiscent of the Third Reich and looks like a plausible MAGA future in its suppression of human rights, control over the media, and its authoritarian bluntness. If only Lando Calrissian would show up to take down the Death Star here on earth.

3. The Last Of Us

Although it’s considered prestige television, at first glance, The Last of Us, a television adaptation of the popular immersive video game series of the same name, could be mistaken for yet another zombie apocalypse, because let’s be honest, it is. But The Last of Us is, first and foremost, compelling storytelling. And much like The Walking Dead, despite the incessant chase scenes, blood and gore, and the cure for the Zombie virus that will probably never arrive, the most lethal bodies roaming the earth are not the infected zombies, but the “healthy” human survivors driven by scarcity and hyped-up amygdalas.

If you were anticipating the consequences of all the damage wrought as Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) ran the zombie gauntlet in season one, your blood thirst will be sated. The overarching theme for season two is “what goes around comes around,” and indeed, hell hath no fury like a wronged The Last of Us character. As a result, each episode is one of the most vividly violent hours on television, which has the effect of putting the tender moments in the series in extraordinarily touching relief.

Unlike season one, the pacing drags at points and sometimes the impulse towards revenge and gratuitous combativeness becomes hard to empathize with. And no spoilers here, but there are dramatic season pivots that will make you question if season three can possibly be as good as the first two.

2. The Diplomat

Most political thrillers, even the best of them like “House of Cards”, tend to take themselves very seriously. But who needs that now? The current state of domestic and international affairs is stressful enough.

That’s why The Diplomat is the perfect cocktail of televised palace intrigue: Smart government machinations and tricky plot twists with dashes of frisky comedy and sexual tension. In short, The Diplomat is fun.

Keri Russell stars in the title role of Kate Wyler, a highly respected veteran of the foreign service. In the first season, Kate becomes the American ambassador to the United Kingdom, only to discover that she is being groomed and positioned for bigger things by higher-ups who are in cahoots with her insufferably meddling husband, Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewall), also a veteran diplomat.

To describe the second season in any more detail would be to set off a series of spoilers, so I will respectfully refrain. Suffice to say, Kate proves herself time and again to be the smartest one in the room, even while she is being manipulated. She unwittingly sets herself up for a promotion, although not the one she was originally expecting. There are so many noteworthy performances starting with Russell, who has found another great vehicle since her brilliant and dour turn in The Americans. Sewall is devishly swarmy, while David Gyasi is both commanding and vulnerable as Austin Dennison, the British Foreign Secretary and Kate’s mutual lust interest. The likes of Rory Kinnear, Allison Janney, and Michael McKean are also on hand to make the quick-fire script pop and glisten.

1. Severance

Giving new meaning to the term “work-life balance,” Severence spins the tale of a shady corporate employer, Lumon, that develops and uses “severance” technology on its own employees. This technology bifurcates an employee’s consciousness into a set of memories for home life and another for the office, with never the two intended to meet. Adam Scott stars as severed Mark S./Mark Scout who develops bonds with a motley crew of fellow severed co-workers who collectively make up Lumon’s “MDR” department.

Season two ends where season one left off, with each “innie” member of the MDR unit getting a glimpse of their respective “outie” lives. If season one spends most of its time on innie and outie world building, season two follows the collision of these worlds. Scott gives an remarkably dexterous performance as he shuttles purposefully between innie and outie identities. The supporting cast includes all-stars like Christopher Walken and John Turturro as severed employees, and Patracia Arquette as an icy Lumon overseer who eventually goes rogue. Honorable mention goes to Tramell Tillman as the ridiculously uptight assistant manager, Milchick.

The most satisfying element of Severance is its quirky originality. The Lumon office building, for instance, is a surreal labyrinth of fluorescent lights and sterile hallways, with twisted psycho-engineering lurking behind every door. Beyond the broad category of science fiction, Severance doesn’t fit neatly into any television genre and thus is not bound by obvious formulas or narrative conventions. This inventiveness reliably keeps viewers off balance and clueless as to what’s coming next, and the season two finale will leave you smacking your lips in anticipation of the next season.

On August 14, I began the gradual release of my ranked choices of the nominees, from my least favorite to my most favorite, in four marquee categories: Outstanding Television Movie; Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series; Outstanding Comedy Series; and Outstanding Drama Series.

These choices are not predictions of what will win, nor am I trying to tell you what is the objectively “best” television film or series; just my personal favorites. I hope that reading these mini reviews will simply help you be a more informed and discerning viewer.

This week: Outstanding Comedy Series

Of all the categories I’m covering, Outstanding Comedy Series is arguably the most competitive, most subjective, and trickiest to rate. There is not one clunker among these eight nominees, but one of them is an apple (“The Bear”) compared to seven oranges. Except for the drama-centered “The Bear,” all of them are also stuffed with smart and uproarious gags that hit every 10 seconds or so. As a result, instead of rating them based on how funny they are, I considered other factors, like poignancy, plot playoffs, and well-developed, unforgettable characters.

7. Only Murders in the Building

Only Murders in the Building follows neighbors Mabel (Selena Gomez), Charles (Steve Martin), and Oliver (Martin Short) as they create a podcast that chronicles their own amateur sleuthing of murder cases in their Upper West Side apartment building, the Arconia. The first season of Only Murders dropped in 2021 and felt relatively closer to the moment’s post-pandemic zeitgeist; at the time, it seemed like everyone and their grandmother was hooked on true crime or trying to produce a podcast in their closet.

Now, with the show in its fourth season (with a fifth season ready to begin later this month), true crime podcasts are old hat. In addition, with so many residents getting consistently offed at the Arconia, one has to wonder why anyone would continue to live there or why the FBI hasn’t raided the joint.

By 2024, our crime-fighting trio is no longer simply a group of lonely neighbors awkwardly searching for companionship and a sense of purpose, but are now chosen family to one another. Charitably, Oliver is given a love interest who is not a serial killer, but the excitement that drives the action this season is the production of a feature film based on the podcast they are creating. Along the way, we predictably chase down false flags and red herrings before arriving at the door of a murderer whose motives would have left Agatha Christie rolling her eyes.

The weakest acting link continues to be a humorless Selena Gomez, who takes her straight woman role too seriously and infects her character with a case of Chronic Dullness Syndrome. On the other hand, Only Murder is infused this season with enough star power to choke a Hollywood freeway, which suggests that Martin and Short’s comic magic was deemed insufficient to carry the season on its own.

Not only does the incomparable Meryl Streep reprise a role from season 3, but Eva Longoria, Eugene Levey, Zach Galifianakis, Molly Shannon, Melissa McCarthy, and Ron Howard are tossed in for added giggles. Which reminds me: Look for McCarthy and her square-off with Streep. It’s a classic. Unfortunately, the parts of the series are more enjoyable than the sum of them.

6. Hacks

Much of the attention Hacks has received from the press focuses on Jean Smart. Both Smart and her character, the hard-charging diva Deborah Vance, rage exquisitely against the sunset of their celebrated Hollywood careers. The series, however, is really about the tortured business partnership, complicated friendship, and co-dependency between Vance and her young writer mentee, Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder).

Season four highlights Vance and Daniels landing their dream jobs on the Late Night television stage. The first half of the season is a particularly toxic brew of a Deborah vs. Ava power struggle, but the second half extends some relief to this sparring long enough to provide fun observations on La La Land’s (mostly white) patriarchal, ageist entertainment culture. Hacks would not be my natural go-to and I don’t share the fetish that many critics seem to have for Smart, but the chemistry between Smart and Einbinder is undeniable and alone worth the watch.

5. The Studio

If there was a popular, if not common, thread among this year’s nominees, it’s a nervous tick caused by the dimming prospects of big- and small-screen entertainment alike. It shows up in Only Murders in the Building, Hacks, and even What We Do in the Shadows, but in The Studio, this anxiety is the guiding spirit and raison d’être.

In the premier season, Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) takes charge of Continental Studios, a transaction that quickly reveals itself to be a case of the dog catching the car. As Matt struggles to keep the studio alive, each episode turns into a manic, stupendously incompetent attempt by Matt and his staff to stave off professional oblivion. Reminiscent of Entourage, The Studio is written with an inside-Hollywood, self-parodying style that makes you question how cinematic brilliance ever makes it to the screen.

Rogen is his usual semi-adorable, desperately vulnerable self, and his co-stars — Catherine O’Hara, Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders, Kathryn Hahn, and Keyla Monterroso Mejia — hilariously hold their own as a breathless crew of bumblers. The frenetic pace is an acquired taste and is not easy on the viewer’s nervous system, but The Studio just might be the corrective lens and coping mechanism I need to process the film industry’s heartbreaking demise in plain sight.

4. What We Do in the Shadows

The title What We Do in the Shadows may as well describe the production strategy of this quirky, niche comedy whose sensibility feels like it is directed at an underground goth audience. What We Do is shot from the perspective of a documentary crew filming a Staten Island household of vampires and their monster mash community (Imagine The Office spliced with the The Addams Family). This intentional family of vampires (which includes an “energy” vampire who sucks your life force through painfully tedious conversation) is haplessly trying to take over the United States, but they can’t seem to get their stuff together beyond their front door.

In its fourth season, the show’s most important plot development is that the sole mortal in the household, the lovable, but emotionally handicapped Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), finally comes into his own and declares his independence from his voluntary slavery to his vampire masters. However, the central delight of the show’s potty-mouthed, death-casual comedy remains its bottomless font of inventiveness and irreverence. Even in an Emmy category defined by broadly mined yucks, What We Do is unhinged silliness.

Because it’s in its final season, What We Do goes for broke and can’t help but share its love of film-making. In this season’s flourish of cinematic citations, What We Do includes references to The Warriors, Batman, and Frankenstein, while sampling endings from the Usual Suspects, Rosemary’s Baby, and even The Bob Newhart Show. And for the record, the finale sticks the landing.

What We Do is not for everyone, but if it happens to appeal to your graveyard tastes, you will be sorry to see the coffin slam shut on it.

3. Nobody Wants This

After the first few minutes of the premier season of Nobody Wants This, you might speculate that the title refers not only to the two starry-eyed lovers at the heart of this romantic comedy, but also to the subject matter of the show itself. The idea of a culture clash put in motion when a Jewish rabbi and a “shiksa” (Gentile woman) fall in love may have seemed like a good idea when it was first greenlit, but in this decidedly fraught post-October 7 environment, its politics feel muted. And as a Black person who has watched in horror when Black tropes and stereotypes have made their way into otherwise smart and successful treatments, I can only imagine that some Jewish viewers may not be able to get past all the over-the-top performative Jewishness played for laughs and ridiculousness.

In this case, the Jewish schtick happens to come attached to some flawless comic acting and a successful romantic comedy that features what is otherwise sorely lacking these days: actual chemistry between the two heterosexual leads, in this case Noah (Adam Brody) and Joanne (Kristen Bell). Yes, the podcast that Joanne and her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) host is a case study in white mediocrity and amateur frivolity. That aside, Morgan and Noah’s brother Sasha (Timothy Simons) provide a priceless sibling subplot that makes for multiple laugh points.

Nobody Wants This doesn’t just make you laugh. It makes you swoon and cheer for the possibility of love in a world fractured by ignorance, meanness, and compulsive othering. I can’t speak for Nobody, but I, for one, definitely want this.

2. Shrinking

It’s obvious that Shrinking and Ted Lasso share DNA in the form of Shrinking co-creator and guest star, Bred Goldstein, who portrays Roy Kent in Ted Lasso. Now in its second season, Shrinking is Ted Lasso’s heir apparent; it’s a “nice” comedy that transforms the genre by providing low-intensity, yet sensitive, drama that never fails to highlight the best in human beings.

Shrinking gets its title from its setting in the office of a behavioral therapy practice made up of Jimmy (Jason Segal), Gaby (Jessica Williams), and the O.G., Paul (Harrison Ford). Jimmy’s unorthodox style of therapy not only involves becoming personally involved in the lives of his patients, but he also motivates his patients to help him through his own issues, namely recovering from the death of his wife and raising his embittered teenage daughter.

The second season spends a considerable amount of time on Jimmy and his daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell) as they process their shared grief and demonstrate the power of forgiveness. What truly makes Shrinking special, though, is how deftly it explores relationships, not just between the main characters, but multi-laterally between the secondary characters as well. And oh, yeah — Harrison Ford has never been more delightfully grumpy.

Shrinking strikes a balance between providing feel-good television and diving painfully into the messiness that is everyone’s emotional survival. It’s smart, deeply empathetic and celebrates the healing power of human tenderness.

1. Abbott Elementary

One of the few nominees that lives on linear network television, Abbot Elementary is all the more impressive because it is a veritable television workhorse, producing anywhere from 13 to 22 episodes per season. Set in a public school that is based in a low-income, Black section of Philadelphia, every school day is yet another opportunity to poke gentle fun at the earnest educators, struggling parents, cynical administrators, and nonsensical levers of bureaucracy that somehow keep the gears of public education turning. Abbott Elementary has its fun with the students, but they are mostly the backdrop and inspirations for the adult characters.

Laboring to maintain a high level of storyline quality and character development has doomed many a sitcom in the past. While I was concerned that some of the freshness was beginning to wane, the second half of Abbott Elementary’s season four picked up the momentum and, once again, delivered one of the most finely tuned on-screen ensembles .

Although Abbott Elementary gives us characters that are predictable and drawn consistently to type, Janine (Qunta Brunson), Gregory (Tyler James Williams), Ava (Janelle James), Schemmenti (Lisa An Walter), Jacob (Chris Perfetti), Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph), and Mr. Johonson (William Stanford Davis) are still given room to grow and evolve. As with most workplace sitcoms, the tenures of some of the main characters, like Ava for example, are inevitably put at risk in season four, but in the end, we have little doubt that they will emerge unscathed. Janine and Gregory finally settle into a relationship, but the screenwriters manage to keep the romantic tensions intact and perky.

It’s worth mentioning that Abbott Elementary is a product of the only Black creator and predominantly Black cast among the nominees, and the leadership depicted in Abbott is that of Black women. And the characters don’t just “happen” to be Black, but are quietly celebratory in their identity while demonstrating a humanity that runs as deep as any other show on television. May its school bell keep ringing.

Doesn’t Belong on this List: The Bear

It’s been said many times, by many other critics, but The Bear simply doesn’t belong on a list of comedies. Comedy is, at best, a side flex in The Bear. Yes, there are times when it is trying to amuse you or employ dark humor, but the predominant goal of The Bear to make you keep all of your emotional responses on high alert — to empathize, to cry, to be anxious, to feel.

It’s been a whirlwind tour of ups and downs over the past four seasons as we have watched Carmy (Jeremy White), Sidney (Ayo Eedebiri), and their band of beleaguered restauranteurs hustle to keep their beloved Chicago restaurant, the Bear, alive while sweating and bleeding over every dish. At first blush, The Bear is a high-intensity, behind-the-scenes look at the art of food preparation and the human cost of getting that plate of bucatini in front of you. But it’s also an examination of sacrificial perfectionism; dysfunctional, yet loving, family; and the processing of trauma. While the center of attraction is the celebrity white male chef in the form of Carmy, his young Black protégée, Sydney, is the straw that stirs the restaurant’s drink. Meanwhile, the soul of the Bear is decentralized and distributed among the ensemble members of the restaurant, most of whom are granted their own backstories.

The 2025 Emmys are considering season three of The Bear, but since season four was released before the nominees were announced, I will speak to that. In season four the staff members of the restaurant have a matter of weeks before the source of the restaurant’s capital is withdrawn, which propels the show along another high-anxiety, high-stakes ride. All of the neuroses that the staff and members of the Berzatto family have been holding and beating each other up with in the previous three seasons finally (phew!) come to a head and get confronted this season. Hang-ups are confessed, apologies are issued, and tears are summoned, particularly in the last few episodes, which all seem calculated to bring you to your emotional knees.

It becomes apparent in the final moments of the season that, given the trajectory of the story arch, the next season of The Bear should be its last. As far as the Emmys are concerned, The Bear belongs in the “drama series” category, where it would be a strong contender in an already strong field. It certainly ain’t trying to be the funniest, but it’s arguably the best written, best acted, and most exhausting hour of television you will find today.

This article appears in the September 4, 2025 edition of the Amsterdam News and is reprinted with the publisher’s permission.