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Black Girl Watching

Black Girl Watching is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Brooke Obie.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
People We Meet on Vacation (2026) Brooke Obie Give up your dream job and return to the site of your trauma, so he knows it’s real. This tired rom-com represents the worst of the genre that reinforces for women that their lives have no meaning or depth unless they commit to a man.
Posted Jan 22, 2026  Edit critic review
Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) Brooke Obie His franchise simply perpetuates the colonialism, destruction, and counter-revolution that he pretends to critique. And that makes James Cameron his franchise’s own worst enemy and its true villain.
Posted Dec 31, 2025  Edit critic review
Wicked: For Good (2025) Brooke Obie With a script this bad, For Good was doomed from the start, sacrific[ing] character development, story, and...political integrity. It merely gestures at anti-fascism. The lesser evil wins, but it's still evil.
Posted Nov 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Palestine 36 (2025) Brooke Obie Palestine36 shows not only the birth of the occupation, but also the birth of resistance. When people are occupied, resistance is justified. A gorgeous, sprawling, heartbreaking epic that shows the true history and resilience of a people who will be free.
Posted Oct 28, 2025  Edit critic review
The Perfect Neighbor (2025) Brooke Obie Marion County police documented in great detail their own incompetence, their own inadequacies, their ongoing failures. If it doesn’t stir us to abolition then it’s just another in a long list of bodycam snuff videos of Black life and who does that serve?
Posted Oct 28, 2025  Edit critic review
Die My Love (2025) Brooke Obie Grace potentially hooking up with a Black Peeping Tom in the woods as evidence of her descent into breakdown is prob-lem-a-tic! for a plethora of the age-old racist stereotypes showcased in the film that gave rise to the KKK, The Birth of a Nation.
Posted Oct 28, 2025  Edit critic review
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025) Brooke Obie An exploration of generational mother-daughter wounds with palpable rage, grief and resentment. But "why is this character Black and what does this mean for the story?" is a series of questions I’d like more writer/directors to ponder in development.
Posted Oct 28, 2025  Edit critic review
After the Hunt (2025) Brooke Obie There are concepts of a good movie in here and Roberts and Garfield are particularly great, but After the Hunt does not earn its runtime and the coda of the film is a disaster that only exists to fulfill the promise of the title.
Posted Oct 28, 2025  Edit critic review
Opus (2025) Brooke Obie Opus is just digital tape and runtime. It’s not particularly scary or interesting, it offers nothing new to say about cults, or vanity journalism as a tool for propaganda, and worse, it says that nothing in an uncompelling way.
Posted Oct 28, 2025  Edit critic review
Master (2022) Brooke Obie Master doesn’t stick the landing, but it is a good warning for those who believe ascending to the heights of these anti-Black institutions (that were literally built on slavery) will be worth what it costs of your humanity to climb.
Posted Oct 28, 2025  Edit critic review
Weapons (2025) Brooke Obie It’s maybe an allegory for addiction; Zach Cregger has talked about being the child of an alcoholic but said "the alcoholic metaphor is not important to me.” I can tell. It’s a horror-comedy about a witch who feeds on children. We should leave it at that.
Posted Oct 28, 2025  Edit critic review
The Skeleton Key (2005) Brooke Obie The worst horror movie I’ve ever seen. Kate Hudson, you are going to jail! Ehren Kruger won a Razzie for Worst Screenplay for the wrong movie. The Skeleton Key is so devious and underhanded in its anti-Blackness and it should haunt Kruger forever.
Posted Oct 28, 2025  Edit critic review
One Battle After Another (2025) Brooke Obie One Fetish After Another: Paul Thomas Anderson’s empty foray into revolutionary ideology and iconography hypersexualizes Black women, leaves much to be desired and simply refuses to end.
Posted Sep 30, 2025  Edit critic review
The Christophers (2025) Brooke Obie A heart-warming story of a man in the twilight of his life who finds hope and renewed energy for one last hurrah in a pupil and teacher he never saw coming.
Posted Sep 20, 2025  Edit critic review
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2025) Brooke Obie Its African, nonlinear layering of time can make for a bit of a challenging watch to the average viewer, but would make a stunning museum exhibit.
Posted Sep 20, 2025  Edit critic review
The Man in My Basement (2025) Brooke Obie Corey Hawkins and Willem Dafoe are formidable; Latif’s direction is stylish and the cinematography of the historic Black neighborhood is stunning, but the message of the film seems to be that getting revenge against your oppressors makes you just as bad.
Posted Sep 20, 2025  Edit critic review
My Father's Shadow (2025) Brooke Obie With stunning cinematography and a compelling, semi-autobiographical script, Akinola Davies Jr. and co-writer Wale Davies set the grief over an absent parent against the backdrop of crumbling hope in a country whose leaders choose power over love.
Posted Sep 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Dinner with Friends (2025) Brooke Obie As most romantic movies center on sexual partnership, it’s lovely to see a film focus on the work of romance in long-term friendship: the grand gestures, the apologies, the consistencies and the love.
Posted Sep 20, 2025  Edit critic review
The Eyes of Ghana (2025) Brooke Obie An inspiring opus of not only Kwame Nkrumah’s but Chris Hesse’s life and the urgency of African filmmaking and historical preservation.
Posted Sep 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Hedda (2025) Brooke Obie It isn’t a love story; it’s a power struggle, and Thompson plays the title role like a runaway train. Hedda is thrilling, fun, tragic, gorgeously shot and DaCosta’s best film to date.
Posted Sep 20, 2025  Edit critic review
The Truth About Jussie Smollett? (2025) Brooke Obie Missing surveillance footage winds up like a Rorschach test for the audience, and still shows how Smollett could’ve been telling the truth the whole time. Journalism is the real winner of this doc, and I hope we see more of it.
Posted Sep 06, 2025  Edit critic review
Unknown Number: The High School Catfish (2025) Brooke Obie This is a documentary about pedophilia and not even the documentarians seem to realize that. You’ll find a more compelling story about this tragedy in The Cut, which includes much of the missing context from this low-rent documentary.
Posted Sep 06, 2025  Edit critic review
Songs from the Hole (2024) Brooke Obie Part documentary, part visual album, Songs from the Hole is a gorgeous meditation on healing toxic masculinity and breaking generational cycles. It’s thoughtful, it’s searing, it’s painful, and, just like abolition itself, well worth the effort.
Posted Aug 24, 2025  Edit critic review
Highest 2 Lowest (2025) Brooke Obie Though Alan Fox’s script is the weakest part, Denzel and Rocky still make a lush playground of their characters while the women don’t exist beyond their roles as accessories in Lee's paper bag test visual language. Highest 2 Lowest lands in the middle.
Posted Aug 18, 2025  Edit critic review
The Woman in the Yard (2025) Brooke Obie Though the ending is a bit sloppy, the beautifully shot & almost great film is still a worthwhile watch as it explores the horrors of grief & mental health. Deadwyler is so close to getting the role that will make this industry stand up and pay attention.
Posted Aug 07, 2025  Edit critic review
Freakier Friday (2025) Brooke Obie A barrage of ageism, with Jamie Lee Curtis mocking how horrific her wrinkle-filled old face and body look for laughs. Has our timeline also been swapped with 2003? It’s played. It’s tired. They should’ve kept this in the Disney Vault.
Posted Aug 07, 2025  Edit critic review
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) Brooke Obie [visually] set in the era...that MAGA longs for...director Matt Shakman and team should have considered more carefully the political implications of this film’s visual narrative. Lowkey, it’s giving pro-life, trad-wife content.
Posted Jul 27, 2025  Edit critic review
Superman (2025) Brooke Obie Superman is bigger than its sublime action. By putting an avatar of the Palestinian people at the heart of [it] and demanding that the heroes of the world do whatever it takes to protect them, Gunn has achieved exactly what a superhero movie should be.
Posted Jul 13, 2025  Edit critic review
D
F1 The Movie (2025) Brooke Obie This is a Jerry Bruckheimer film, after all; if we’re expecting women characters to be full people and not just moms of sons or the twenty-years-younger love interest of the boomer lead (Kerry Condon, you deserved better) then, that’s kind of on us.
Posted Jun 28, 2025  Edit critic review
C
Materialists (2025) Brooke Obie Song’s direction in Materialists is flawless. Her dialogue is lived in and her scenes are memorable. But every main character is miscast and this otherwise realistic examination of love under capitalism falls into outrageous fantasy by the third act.
Posted Jun 24, 2025  Edit critic review
Mountainhead (2025) Brooke Obie By the end, Mountainhead falls into the same “so, what now?” dilemma of most “eat the rich” satires. Nobody but the poor ever actually ends up on the skewer.
Posted May 29, 2025  Edit critic review
Sinners (2025) Brooke Obie A love letter to Southern Black people and our generational tradition of searching for and finding freedom through the arts...but who Coogler chooses to let live to tell the story and who he chooses to die feels too much like a metaphor to ignore.
Posted Apr 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Your Monster (2024) Brooke Obie When I say this movie has everything, I mean everything: Rom-com-horror-fantasy-MUSICAL. And it’s brilliant at every genre.
Posted Apr 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Wicked (2024) Brooke Obie [Elphaba] is perhaps the most radical...character on film in 2024.
Posted Jan 01, 2025  Edit critic review
The Last Showgirl (2024) Brooke Obie Confronted with the reality that she might not have anything to show for her career, and due to ageism, has no way to pivot into a new one, Anderson’s showgirl defiantly rejects the idea that she has to defend her choice, even when it hurts people.
Posted Dec 19, 2024  Edit critic review
Nickel Boys (2024) Brooke Obie This Metta filmmaking is an incredible and effective achievement that has more than earned its effusive praise—and while I’ll only ever watch it once, I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.
Posted Dec 19, 2024  Edit critic review
Moana 2 (2024) Brooke Obie I love when kids’ movies subtly address colonization and teach children that ancestors never leave us and want to help us. And the music slaps!
Posted Dec 19, 2024  Edit critic review
Mufasa: The Lion King (2024) Brooke Obie The visual effects are incredible; there were so many luminous shots and camera angles. Ultimately, and unfortunately, Jenkins was hamstrung by the literal title and premise of the story.
Posted Dec 19, 2024  Edit critic review
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