Alex Kellogg

For most of the history of American cinema, the black bad guy has been a caricature, not a sophisticated villain. Denzel Washington is changing that.

Bamako is an uneven but memorable meditation on Africa and the follies of Western aid.

The dissolution of Somalia into further violence thanks to Ethiopia’s invasion of it in the last few weeks is a horrific development for East Africa. It’s devastating to the perception of the United States abroad as well. Ethiopia said that, beyond a concern for the integrity of its borders, tacit U.S. support led it to […]

Though it perhaps plays a more positive role than ever before in American popular culture, race has played an unmistakably divisive role this election season. The Republican leadership showed its true colors with the instantly infamous ad it funded in Tennessee playing into the lingering aversion among Southern voters to interracial sex. Americans shouldn’t quickly […]

Those who still think of OutKast merely as a pair of hip hop artists may have failed to notice the spaceship these two young Atlanta natives have been flying around since well before 2003. That’s the year Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which had even the most vehement hip hop antagonists swooning, was released. The hard-to-compare, even-harder-to-define […]

Images are what make films, and no footage shot in the past year could have provided more powerful imagery than that of Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed lives from Florida to Louisiana to Mississippi. Spike Lee’s epic and complicated documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, poignantly weaves reams of astonishing footage into […]

When Nicholas Berg, a 26-year-old freelance contractor who fixed radio towers, was beheaded on videotape in Iraq in May 2004, it marked the beginning of a new wave of violent retaliation by Islamic militants — and a sign that a more brutal war lay ahead. So when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq […]

When Nicholas Berg, a 26-year-old freelance contractor who fixed radio towers, was beheaded on videotape in Iraq in May 2004, it marked the beginning of a new wave of violent retaliation by Islamic militants — and a sign that a more brutal war lay ahead. So when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq […]

On a recent episode of Chappelle’s Show, (Tuesdays, 10 and 10:30pm, Comedy Central) its star and host, Dave Chappelle, performed a sketch as a black George Bush (accompanied by, among others, comedian Jamie Foxx as Tony Blair and hip-hop icon Mos Def in place of then-CIA chief George Tenet). In Chappelle’s skin, Bush is a […]