Cinema News: Rediscovering the Black Pack

April 3, 2026 | View in browser

Two men in tuxedos in front of a neon sign that reads Sugar Ray

By Mark Olsen

Staff Writer

Hello! I'm Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

This is another strong week for new releases. By now you have likely heard something about "The Drama," which has become inescapable thanks to the tireless promotion of its two stars, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.

In a movie written and directed by Norwegian provocateur Kristoffer Borgli ("Dream Scenario"), the pair play Emma and Charlie, an engaged couple who find their wedding week thrown into disarray by the revelation of a deep secret from the bride-to-be.

As Amy Nicholson put it in her review, "To another screenwriter, 'The Drama' would be an intimate study and a more emotionally wrenching film. But Borgli forces us to parse the mushy stuff from the mess and analyze the pending nuptials as an impersonal problem: What comes after a public shaming for the guilty and the inquisitors? That's one of the most important (and unresolved) questions of the modern era, so I'll forgive the filmmaker for being no more interested in writing Emma and Charlie as complex human beings than if they were character names in a math quiz about two people on two trains speeding toward a crash."

Meanwhile, Tim Grierson spoke to Shira Small, the folk artist whose sole 1974 album features a song heard in an early scene of "The Drama." Small, a delightful interview, goes into the music career she left behind a long time ago — one which may be reigniting now thanks to the movie.

Also opening in Los Angeles this week is Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid's "Yes," a guaranteed conversation-starter. Ariel Bronz stars as a musician who, in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, decides to say yes to composing a vicious new political anthem..

Reviewing the film, Joshua Rothkopf said, "It's a movie about a citizenry at war with itself, hoping to keep the plates spinning for one more night. You watch it and think how easy it would be to envision an American remake — and wonder, too, if a filmmaker like Lapid even exists here."

One of my favorite films from SXSW 2025, "Fantasy Life," is finally coming to theaters. Written and directed Matthew Shear, the movie is an affectionate nod to the chatty dramedies of Noah Baumbach (some of which Shear has acted in). Here he plays Sam, a troubled law school dropout who takes a job looking after the children of a Brooklyn couple (Amanda Peet and Alessandro Nivola) and finds himself in an emotional affair with the wife.

I recently spoke to Shear and Peet about their collaboration on the film. Peet's character in the film is also an actor and, though much of the film's anxieties felt familiar to her, one scene in particular is drawn from Peet's own experience: She is often mistaken in public for Lake Bell, including once on a red carpet.

"It's a weird thing because you're like, what do I do here?" said Peet with a laugh. "What's the least douchey way to get out of this?"

The Black Pack's resistance humor

Curated around a new book by Artel Great, the UCLA Film and Television Archive is launching the series "The Black Pack: Rewriting American Comedy," to spotlight a moment in the 1980s and '90s when a small group of Black creators reached the very heights of Hollywood.

Eddie Murphy, Paul Mooney, Robert Townsend, Keenan Ivory Wayans and Arsenio Hall were friends and collaborators who, from 1987 to 1994, created the work showcased in the series. The Black Pack is a name they gave to themselves, partly in response to the John Hughes-affiliated Brat Pack.

Things begin tonight with a 35mm screening of Townsend's essential 1987 satire "Hollywood Shuffle." Great will be there for an introduction and a Q&A with cast member Anne-Marie Johnson and Spring Mooney, daughter of late actor Paul Mooney, who also appeared in the movie.

Other events include an evening of episodes of Wayans' sketch comedy series "In Living Color," 1988's "Coming to America," starring Murphy and Hall, a 35mm screening of Townsend's 1991 "The Five Heartbeats" and a 35mm screening of 1989's "Harlem Nights," the only movie starring, directed, written and produced by Murphy, then at the height of his cultural capital.

This series is a terrific example of why smart programming matters. Here is a group of films (and a TV show) that might seem only related in a vague way, but when put together under a specific theme or idea, they are suddenly transformed into something revelatory.

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Each evening of the series is designed to make the case for a different aspect of the Black Pack's work and influence. The series as a whole puts forward a larger concept Great has coined a term for.

"I'm arguing through the series that the Black Pack's cultural material is connected to a longstanding tradition that I call Black resistance humor," says Great, now an associate professor at San Francisco State University, in an interview this week. "This idea of Black resistance humor is really a cultural practice where Black cultural workers are using political wit, irony, satire, parody, absurdity to challenge corrupt authority, to give voice to racial trauma and also attach themselves to re-imagining what freedom can really look like."

There are plans for Black Pack programs in other cities, including Atlanta, San Francisco and Chicago, bringing this fresh look at their specific moment to venues around the country.

"I'm hopeful that the series will allow communities and audiences to see the Black Pack as cultural strategists who are using this idea of Black resistance humor to address very serious issues of power, identity and race," says Great. "But also as a way of thinking, as a way of seeing and as a way of building alternative systems. Because that's what they were able to do."

Points of interest

'The Birthday Party' in 35mm

As part of its series celebrating the legacy of actor Robert Shaw, the Academy Museum will screen 1968's "The Birthday Party" in 35mm on Sunday. One of the earliest features directed by William Friedkin (who would go on to such classics as "The Exorcist" and "To Live and Die in L.A."), the film's screenplay was written by Harold Pinter, adapting his own play. Shaw, Friedkin and Pinter make for a combustible intensity.

Shaw plays Stanley, the lone boarder at a seaside inn. When two mysterious men (Dandy Nichols and Sydney Tafler) arrive, they engineer a party for Stanley that becomes increasingly ominous.

In his original review, Charles Champlin lauded Shaw, saying he gives "one of the total and totally engrossing movie performances," adding that Friedkin "as a director is everything a dramatist, and an audience, could want. The sense of loving care and artistic sureness which characterizes every aspect of the movie is extremely tonic. Pinter may be an acquired taste, but it is easy to acquire."

'He Got Game' in 35mm

Spike Lee's prolific career is now studded with movies that maybe didn't quite get their due in their day but deserve renewed attention. Screening in 35mm on Sunday at Brain Dead Studios is Lee's 1998 "He Got Game," which is just that kind of movie: stuffed with ideas and ambitions even if it doesn't totally all come together for everyone. I particularly like his use of composer Aaron Copland's music, which gives many of the images an epic quality they might not otherwise fully achieve, challenging preconceived notions of what can be thought of as Americana.

The movie stars a particularly electric Denzel Washington as Jake Shuttlesworth, a once-promising basketball player whose life took a turn. Now he's in prison. His son, Jesus (played by NBA star Ray Allen), is a promising prospect and Jake is given an offer of a reduced sentence if he can convince his son to attend a certain college. The mixture of two of Lee's own personal preoccupations, basketball and family, makes for a potent combination.

Reviewing the movie when it was released, Kenneth Turan wrote, "Given that writer-director Lee is one of the most visible of the New York Knicks' celebrity fans, what's surprising is not that he made a film about the sport he cares so much about but that he waited so long. … Though 'He Got Game' is periodically awkward and unruly, it benefits, as many of Lee's films do, from the director's determination to connect with the troublesome issues of the real world. Too few American directors work with Lee's kind of social immediacy, and that makes his films, flawed and didactic though they sometimes are, essential viewing."

Harmony Korine's 'Gummo'

Harmony Korine's first feature as director, 1997's "Gummo," will screen at Vidiots on Monday. The event is co-presented by the Cinegogue, a group perhaps best known for their limited-edition movie-themed clothing drops, but who describe their mission thusly: "Our goal: make movies cool again through concert-like experiences and fanfare. … Because even though a movie might end, cinema is forever." (And that's a sentiment we here can get behind.)

The film finds Korine attempting to bring elements of experimental film and video to a nominally more mainstream context. It's both confrontational and playful. Using a collage-like structure, the film follows a few kids as they make their way around their small town in Ohio after a tornado. Mostly featuring non-actors, the cast also includes Linda Manz and Chloë Sevigny, who is also credited as the film's costume designer.

Writing about "Gummo" and Korine's subsequent "julien donkey-boy," Kevin Thomas made special note of "the intensity of Korine's compassion for individuals who have so little going for them and so much going against them, yet at times are capable of experiencing an exhilarating freedom of spirit."