Adesola Thomas

May 11, 2024 | letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas |Shayna Maci Warner |Mitchell Beaupre |Serial Mom

“Is this the cocksucker residence? Isn’t this 4251 Pussy Way?” Murderous suburbanite mother Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) grunts through these scandalizing inquiries during a targeted prank call to a despised neighbor in Serial Mom(1994), one of writer-director John Waters’ classic crime comedies.

Mar 8, 2024 | letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas |Kambole Campbell |Big Picture

Ava DuVernay is practiced in carefully adapting the lived experiences of Black figures across narrative film, documentary and television. She’s captured SCLC and SNCC leaders organizing alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, the Central Park Five’s prosecution in When They See Us, and the reflections of activists and prison abolitionists like Angela Davis in 13th, DuVernay’s documentary about the transmutation of racialized chattel slavery to codified mass incarceration.

Jan 16, 2024 | letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas |Katie Rife |Sasquatch Sunset

With 2023 in the rearview (have you perused our Year in Review yet?), the first pages are turned on a fresh calendar: twelve months of enticing new features for us to open our hearts and souls to. The frigid air of Park City, Utah is never more inviting than in late January, when the independent-forward Sundance Film Festival rolls into town. The Letterboxd mic will be on the ground, so if you’re also there keep an eye out for us in a chilly queue, an early morning bistro or late-night club.

Dec 20, 2023 | letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas

For people who feel internally motivated to make, be it improvisational jazz or fiction that sings, there is the sometimes less gratifying external pressure to make it—to produce work considered prescient, marketable or authentic according to the waymakers in their chosen field. What could otherwise be a generative creative practice becomes a footrace with resources and relevance awaiting those who cross the finish line. What happens, then, for artists who refuse that race?

Nov 2, 2023 | letterboxd.com | Adesola Thomas

“If our lives were to flood, what are the moments that would float to the surface?” This poetic query of Lucille Clifton’s opens and situates All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, the debut feature from filmmaker, photographer and poet Raven Jackson. It was a Grand Jury prize nominee at Sundance earlier this year, and Montclair Film Festival named Jackson their breakthrough director of 2023.