What a time to be alive! On the heels of an AMAZING Club Juke live event last week here in L.A. (recap coming soon, I promise! I’m only one person, become a paid subscriber so I can hire some help!!) we’ve got a very Black, very historic, very Diasporic list of films and TV in this week’s Your Weekly Binge Watch.
Yes, I am doing a name change of this BGW regular segment because I believe in the power of words and decolonizing language. ‘Binge’ is a word associated with eating disorders and has been used as a descriptor of TV-watching without breaks as a way to describe our insatiable and unhealthy TV consumption habits. I get it! But I want to be more intentional about not using this word out of its original context and careful not to trigger anyone managing these disorders by using the word casually when it’s just unnecessary and all I wanna do is tell y’all what I’m watching this week and help you decide if you should watch it too! So, let’s go back to Wakanda, take a whimsical trek across the globe in an air balloon, and revisit the man-made horrors in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in this week’s Your Weekly Watch:
Eyes of Wakanda
Pretend it’s a Saturday morning in the ‘90s and it’s time for one of the best animated series you’ve ever seen. Get into Eyes of Wakanda, Ryan Coogler’s latest foray into the fictional central African nation that he first brought to life in 2018’s live-action Black Panther. It tells the story of the nation’s spies (War Dogs), like Nakia or N’jobu from Black Panther, who have been sent out into the world on secret missions to recover stolen Wakandan artifacts in different time periods, pre-dating the 2018 film by centuries. Each of the four episodes in the limited anthology series follows different spies in different countries, adding exciting twists to tales you might have heard before, like the origins of the Trojan Horse and Achilles’ heel in Greek mythology. The underlying theme is, at any time you can think of, and any lasting story you’ve heard, Africans were there, whether we’d eventually wind up erased from the narrative or not. And that our only hope for survival is to think about what our descendants need, even hundreds of years into the future, and act accordingly. Time is a loop in this gorgeously animated series that deserves more seasons to explore this lush world on screen.
Watch Eyes of Wakanda on Disney+.
Freakier Friday
I know people hate reboots, remakes and sequels, as they often come at the expense of Hollywood greenlighting original stories. And that’s valid! I usually don’t mind them, though—if they exist to fix the sins of the past iteration rather than for just a soulless money grab. Freakier Friday is both. Specifically naming the anti-Asian racism in the 2003 mother-daughter body swap iteration, Indian director Nisha Ganatra set out to address immediately.
“It was something I brought up right away when I had my first meetings with the producers,” Ganatra told Entertainment Weekly. “I had a moment of the presentation that was like, ‘problematic Asian representation!’”
She fixed that by bringing back the two magical Asian restaurant owners who cast the body-swap spell in the last version and allowing them to be regular people in this version. Imagine! She also hired the very hot Manny Jacinto (who will always be Jason Mendoza to me), to be Lohan’s love interest and allowed the Filipino-Canadian actor to play in a British accent (take that, colonizers!) and show off his dance moves and physical comedy. He deserves the world and I’m happy he gets to do a little something in this otherwise awful movie. But you fix “problematic Asian representation!” and add anti-Blackness? Okay.
X Mayo (The Blackening) is the only Black woman character, and she exists to be background in Manny & Lindsay Lohan’s meet-cute, and humiliated in a food fight for comic relief. Jordan Cooper, whom I love, is also reduced to Lohan’s comic relief servant assistant who feeds her green juice as soon as she walks through the door. There weren’t even any Black characters in the 2003 iteration, and maybe that was best if this is as deep as their imagination can go for Black characters.
Pretty immediately after the body-swap happens in this film, we’re subjected to a barrage of ageism, with Jamie Lee Curtis mocking how horrific her wrinkle-filled old face and body look for laughs. Sure, her character has been swapped with a teen girl’s, but has our timeline also been swapped with 2003? It’s played. It’s tired. They should’ve kept this in the Disney Vault.
Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time
This five-part docuseries on the Black New Orleans victims of the outrageous man-made disaster that started and followed Hurricane Katrina is one of the most harrowing things I’ve watched all year. Produced by Ryan Coogler and his Proximity Media banner, this docuseries centers the survivors telling their stories and highlights the monumental failures of George W. Bush, FEMA director Michael Brown, Governor Kathleen Blanco, the city of Algiers, NOPD Police Chief Eddie Compass and the entire NOPD, Bill O’Reilly and the entirety of the mainstream press, (Soledad O’Brien notwithstanding) and more. This documentary series is a long-overdue reckoning.
Twenty years later, I admit that my memory had faded. I was a senior at Hampton University in 2005, and president of the Sociology Club when we put on an event to welcome Xavier and Dillard student transfers that September, and to educate Hampton students on what had transpired. The first “film” I ever made was for this program, a simple slideshow of images set to“Hurricane Song” which documented the horrors that Black survivors faced, being left on rooftops as the floodwaters rose. I’d forgotten all the horrors within horrors. What Coogler has done, once again, is create an archive of Black life; a tonic for the wound; a remembrance. This is spirit work that they’re doing over at Proximity Media, so that we will never again forget. It’s devastating. It’s enraging. It gave me nightmares. The images from Katrina side-by-side with the images coming out of the U.S.-Israeli genocide of Palestinians show how hateful and destructive white delusion of superiority is and how all of our struggles are connected. Katrina—caused by oil companies drilling off the Gulf Coast and the U.S. military—is a byproduct of white delusions of supremacy, capitalism, and environmental racism, just as the US-Israeli genocide in Palestine is, making this docuseries both urgent and timely, as we connect our struggles and find ways to heal and fight back. The survival of the world literally depends on it.
Watch Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time on Hulu.
Washington Black
Sterling K. Brown is on a roll over at Hulu, executive producing and starring in his second series for the platform this year, Washington Black. Based on the novel of the same name, this series departs from Brown’s earlier sci-fi production Paradise, as a historical-fantasy series that celebrates Black genius. Beginning during slavery in Barbados and traveling from the American South to Canada to Antarctica, to Africa, Washington Black tells the story of the titular child prodigy, George Washington Black, whose imagination became the source of his freedom.
Pay no attention to the uneven accents, or the insistence on yet another white-passing woman character who longs to be Black. Though I did roll my eyes at both in that opening episode (and there’s truly no reason for the insecurity revealed in these ever-changing accents—COMMIT TO THE BIT!), it does eventually become clear why this white-passing woman is so intent on being Black when this feels more like modern-day propaganda rather than a regular occurrence during literal slavery and Jim Crow eras. But anyway! Get past these two annoyances and you’re off to the races on a fantastical, family-friendly adventure around the globe in a hot air balloon with a brilliant Black scientist who will one day learn that whiteness will never be his savior. Only reconnection to his Africanness and the bolstering of his own imagination will set him free.
Watch Washington Black on Hulu.
The Woman in the Yard
Justice for Danielle Deadwyler. She’s starred in two widely overlooked films this year, 40 Acres and now The Woman in the Yard, where she gets to be vulnerable and badass and confront the challenges of motherhood under pressure on a family farm. In the psychological horror film, The Woman in the Yard, Deadwyler plays a mom in grief as she cares—or barely cares—for her teen son and young daughter in the aftermath of her husband’s recent death in a car accident. One day, a woman dressed in funeral attire, a black veil over her face, comes and sits in the yard of their farm. The haunting figure forces buried family truths to come to light. Though the ending is a bit sloppy, the beautifully shot and almost great film is still a worthwhile watch (even for the scaredy cats), as it explores the horrors of grief and mental health when children are depending on a mother’s wholeness. Deadwyler is so close to getting the role that will make this industry stand up and pay attention to this deserving talent.
Watch The Woman in the Yard on Peacock.
Side Pieces
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I and Black Girl Watching received a 2025 Rotten Tomatoes Critics Grant to attend the Toronto International Film Festival next month! Whoo! BGW launched last December with films I saw at TIFF ‘24, so I am thrilled to be going back and to have the support of Rotten Tomatoes, a regular traffic source to this platform, as I build on everything BGW can be. We outchea!
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Good news! She’s Dead! And Just Like That…has been canceled after three horrible seasons, and just like that, our long, waking nightmare of hatewatching is over and we are free to hate watch something else! Any suggestions? I’m thinking Love Island: Beyond the Villa, because now that I know I was *always right* about that snake Kenny being fake, I can keep watching this boring Love Island season 6 spin-off show with the underlying context of all my fave PPGM gang, JaNa, Serena, Leah and Miguel navigating life not knowing there’s a viper in the mix, and that will give this poorly structured, overly-Connored (seriously, why is Connor there?!) snoozefest a much-needed edge.
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The list of the 100 Best Black Films of All Time has been released by Shawn Edwards’ Black Hall of Fame, and I was asked to contribute my top 10 list. Though I do not stand by the order or the entrants on the official 100 list, I stand by my top 10! Here’s my list:
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Sinners (2025) BEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME IDC IDC IDC!
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Moonlight (2016) literally the only other film that made me feel the way Sinners does!
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Nope (2022) a masterpiece and Peele’s best work, fight me!
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Eve’s Bayou (1997) absolute classic. Foundational filmmaking here.
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The Color Purple (1985) note the date!
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Daughters of the Dust (1991) free on Tubi go stream it right now!
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Sorry to Bother You (2018) our anti-capitalist legend Boots Riley
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The Watermelon Woman (1996) Cheryl Dunye is and has always been that girl!
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Beyond the Lights (2014) Gina Prince-Bythewood is the way, the truth and the light!
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Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul (2022) stream it now on Peacock and tell me I’m wrong! I’m so jealous I didn’t write this film. Go, Ebo Twins!
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What’s on your top 10 Black movie list? Let me know in the comments!
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
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