Denzel Washington as Malcolm X in Spike Lee’s epic, whose storied manufacturing began with an outcry by Mr. Lee over the plans of Norman Jewison, a white director, to make the film. A culture-struggle flash point in its time, this passionate, angry mix of documentary, memoir and poetry that was shown on PBS is a milestone in each New Black and New Queer cinema. The ache it articulates — the racism of white society, homophobia amongst some blacks, AIDS, invisibility — is overwhelming, but Riggs turns grief and damage into defiance and wonder and finds new ways to fuse the non-public, the political and the aesthetic. And also, particularly, of an unbiased woman, Nola Darling, and her three lovers. Partly as a result of its affect has been so widely absorbed — via the black romantic comedies of the early 2000s to more modern tv sequence like “Being Mary Jane” … Read More
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