Kimberly Reyes

I was a 16-year-old student at the Bronx High School of Science, scribbling Concrete Blonde lyrics at my desk...

A few weeks back, when New York City announced the minuscule number of black students admitted to its elite specialized high schools, the report generated the usual dialogues around how the system is broken and what, if anything, can be done to fix it. There is no doubt that the numbers are abysmal: Only 12 black students scored high enough on the citywide test to win a seat at my alma mater, Bronx Science, and just seven to Stuyvesant. While I’m concerned for the black students continually l...

I became familiar with British filmmaker Steve McQueen’s work last year while writing a thesis on his 2008 film Hunger, based on the 1981 Irish hunger strike. Hunger is a devastating film no matter how much or how little Irish history you bring to it: the excruciating loss of life makes the viewing experience wrenchingly universal. As my thesis progressed, I trusted McQueen enough to watch his hugely successful and critically acclaimed 2013 film 12 Years a Slave. As a Black American, I’d prev...

All articles written for EW

Duran Duran are back!

George Floyd was the latest in a long line of Black Americans killed by white police officers in the United States. The horrifying video of his killing sparked worldwide protests in the middle of a pandemic with uneven mortality rates that are exposing existing inequalities. While many people around the world champion this new, impromptu, international coalition based around a racial justice reckoning, the overwhelming majority of posts I’ve seen in response to the Black Lives Matter protests...

Reviewed by Kimberly Reyes
I always resist and then ultimately succumb to the latest in antebellum narratives. As I explored in my last review, I’m particularly interested in the merging of post-colonial histories. So when I heard that Neil Jordan had written a novel about the relationship between the runaway Black American slave Tony Small and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, an Irish soldier then fighting on the side of the British during the American Revolution, I felt obliged to engage.

Kimberly Reyes explains how Wakanda Forever accomplishes all the things.
First things first, as a mutantist (a Marvel fan who believes it’s time for mutants to reclaim their place on the MCU throne) I’m over-the-moon with what Namor—heart-stoppingly played by José Tenoch Huerta Mejía—brings to the table in his MCU debut. In a film universe that has become synonymous with mutates like Iron Man, Captain America, Spiderman, and even my beloved Hulk, it’s about time that a complicated mutant, wit...

Let’s be honest, the most memorable scenes in the first two Thor films belonged to (Tom Hiddleston’s) Loki. That’s because Thor, as written, was still finding his way around his Norse godship, and the love story between his character and Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster was always awkward at best, and tiresome at worst (and Thor: The Dark World is pretty much the worst)...

Kimberly Reyes chases a demon in space between universes.

While many of the biggest horror films of the past century were made in America, the horror film genre was not actually born in the United States. French director Georges Melies' 1896 short The House of the Devil is often credited as the first ‘horror’ movie. By the 1920s, Germany's expressionist movement (a rejection of Germany’s bourgeois culture) inspired the highly stylistic and influential films The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, which heavily influenced American cinema.

There’s been quite a bit of natter surrounding the new Donald Glover project Swarm. The seven-episode Amazon Prime series follows Andrea/Dre (Dominique Fishback), a mega-fan of Ni'Jah (Nirine S. Brown)—a popstar who’s not necessarily meant to represent Beyoncé. But the parody is obvious and immediate as each episode begins with the (dis)claimer: “This is not a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is intentional.”
Beyond this boldness, Swarm is a...

While most of my friends chose to head-bang to Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Guns N’ Roses on the hour-long train ride to high school, my yellow Sports Walkman usually played something a little slower and more somber. From the Geto Boys to The Sisters of Mercy...

The new Hulu miniseries The 1619 Project starts with a simple statement: “In August 1619, a ship arrived on these shores in Virginia carrying the very first enslaved Africans to be brought to the British colonies of North America.” Through many different perspectives and narratives, the series expounds on how nothing in American history was the same after this point and, more specifically, on how American history has been shaped by the ripple effects of that voyage

The third and final season of Lisa McGee’s popular series Derry Girls debuted in the UK in January of 2018. It streams for international audiences this month. Its Gen-X, Troubles-era brand of Northern Irish comedy, which follows five working-class friends at a Catholic girls’ school in the 1990s, showed a whole new side of Derry to the world that will be missed.