30 Films That Celebrate Black Lives

Black lives matter.

This statement should not be in the least bit controversial, nor should it require being uttered at all. Yet time and again, abuses committed by the American police and justice systems remind us the value placed on a human being's life too often depends on its owner's skin colour, economic status, social class, gender, gender identity and/or nationality. Such injustices are by no means limited to the United States alone; they manifest themselves in a multitude of countries, each informed by their own specific histories and structures – none of which I am qualified to talk about with any authority.

I would like, instead, to address the role culture has to play in all of this. Culture's primary role has always been to help us make sense of ourselves and each other; how we live together, how we behave with each other, what values guide our lives, how we understand the world around us... every aspect of these forms of knowledge we take for granted is moulded by the storytelling and art we transmit from generation to generation. To paraphrase Charlie Chaplin, the fundamentally communicative nature of this artform cries out to our natural empathy and curiosity, cries out for us to watch, listen and learn from experiences that are not our own.

It is in that spirit that I have assembled a list of 30 films that celebrate Black lives in all their diversity and complexities. To be more specific, this list will concentrate on films that do not feature topics such as slavery, racism, police brutality, gang violence, segregation, colonialism or injustice as their primary focus. Films about these issues, of course, are every bit as legitimate as any other but my intent is to highlight works that put the spotlight on Black humanity rather than Black trauma. Works in which Black characters experience a whole spectrum of human existence as ordinary people who fall in love, fall out of love, hurt each other, hurt themselves, help each other, help themselves, struggle with their emotions, try to figure out what they want and look for happiness, without having to stand in for an entire group or serve as symbols for a greater cause.

While this will not be a wholly exclusive list, I will make a conscious attempt to emphasize films directed and/or written by Black artists. If any of my readers have any film recommendations - particularly from countries or cultures that are either underrepresented or unrepresented on this list - I enthusiastically invite them to post them in the comments below. The same goes, for that matter, for any critiques or advice they might have.

And now, to the list itself:

30 - Mother Of George by Andrew Dosunmu (2013).

Best known for portraying Wakanda's iron-willed General Okoye in Black Panther and Michonne in The Walking Dead TV series, Danai Gurira's best cinematic performance so far can be found in this visually resplendent exploration of tradition, womanhood and desire. Not just another immigrant tale of female emancipation from patriarchal norms, Andrew Dosunmu's drama compassionately envisions the immigrant experience as a space of continuous battles and compromises between different conceptions of being, visualized as a series of tightly-framed explosions of colour and movement mirroring the characters' ever-shifting emotions. This is how you bring feelings to life.

29 - Just Another Girl On The I.R.T. by Leslie Harris (1993).

Have you ever commuted next to a loud teenage girl who spent the entire ride vocally gossiping with her friend about boy trouble or school, in graphic detail with no consideration for any of her fellow passengers? As the title might indicate, this film isn't just about that girl, it is that girl; unruly, ill-disciplined, aggravating, in-your-face...and hiding its depth in plain sight. Alternating between static and handheld, half-satirical mockumentary and half-social drama, Leslie Harris's rough-and-tumble dive into an ambitious Brooklyn girl's battle against her own ego mirrors her protagonist's best and worst traits in the most beautifully expressive way possible. This is a film that doesn't concern itself with being liked as much as it is with being seen and listened to; a film that catches the angry energy of early-90s New York's cultural ruckus like lightning in a bottle filled with nitroglycerin, and proceeds to hurl it straight at the audience's face. The resulting shock to the system may not be an easy or consistently agreeable experience, but it's a vitally worthwhile one.

28 - Drumline by Charles Stone III (2002).

Imagine Whiplash as a teen comedy with its harshly individualistic outlook flipped on its head, and you might get something like this gem. Starring opposite Orlando Jones and a young Zoe Saldana, Nick Cannon beautifully conveys, through headstrong college band drummer Devon Miles, all the excitement and insecurities that come with finding your voice, taming it and finding its place in a wider community. In a storytelling landscape full of geniuses breaking rules and refusing to go with the crowd, it's rare to find a music-centred film so committed to teamwork - even moreso one with such a breathtaking, sublimely-edited finale.

27 - Friday by F. Gary Gray (1995).

F. Gary Gray's stoner comedy classic is well-remembered for its timeless quotability (all together now: "Bye, Felicia.") as well as propelling Chris Tucker into A-list stardom, but it should also be commended for showing a different side to 'hood life. Four years after Boyz N The Hood, writer-star Ice Cube - assisted by DJ Pooh - uses the fundamental humanism of "low-brow" humour to humanize South Central's inhabitants beyond media clichés and remind audiences of the desires, instincts, daily annoyances and bodily functions that unite us all.

26 - The Wood by Rick Famuyiwa (1999).

Black coming-of-age stories are often framed in terms of overcoming gang violence, institutional racism and/or poverty, but those that emphasize the joys of learning and growing through the bonds we form in our youth get comparatively less attention. That is exactly what Rick Famuyiwa's 1999 début does, as it recounts the adolescent misadventures of three young men as they bond through their attempts to survive bullying, stay out of trouble and lose their virginities in Inglewood, California. More than its setting or its characters' skin colour, what distinguishes this film from many similarly-themed comedies is a potent mixture of tenderness and emotional honesty that can only come from stories that the teller has lived in their bones. In a year when teen comedies like American Pie and 10 Things I Hate About You were all the rage, The Wood's heartfelt candour singled it out as something quite special.

25 - Attack The Block by Joe Cornish (2011).

Joe Cornish's John Carpenter-inspired inner-city-vs-outer-space showdown (as the posters promoted it) cuts to the heart of what makes most great alien invasion stories endure: how they highlight and reconfigure divisions within our social fabric. Revealing himself to the world as a natural movie star, John Boyega leads a gang of hoodlums as they use their street smarts and intimate knowledge of their block to defend its residents - including their onetime mugging victim, future Doctor Who star Jodie Whittaker - against a swarm of extra-terrestrial invaders. Beyond its Britishized John Carpenter premise, this film's singularity comes from the sly way its humorous combination of genre tropes reveals unspoken values within the characters, as well as the connective tissue between them, in defiance of initial assumptions. In a decade full of flag-waving prestige dramas anchored in a glorious historical past (Dunkirk, 1917, The King's Speech), Attack The Block just might, in its own unassuming way, be the most subversively patriotic British film of the 2010s.

24 - I Will Follow by Ava DuVernay (2011).

Although she is understandably better known for the righteous indignation that guides her best-known recent work (Selma, 13th, When They See Us), Ava DuVernay's best quality as an artist is her attention to the small details in-between moments that make all the difference in our daily lives and her first feature-length drama demonstrates this beautifully. Starring a sharply sensitive Salli Richardson-Whitfield as an artist processing her complicated relationship with her recently-deceased aunt, I Will Follow movingly captures the imperceptible emotional cuts and bruises that only start to hurt once a person has left our lives forever, in an intimate drama whose aesthetic simplicity gives its characters all the more room to breathe and exist as real people.

23 - Two Can Play That Game by Mark Brown (2001).

The screwball comedy gets a 21st-century update courtesy of the formidable Vivica A. Fox as Shanté Smith, a successful advertising executive who decides to get back at her man when a nightclub incident leads her to think she might not have him on quite as tight a leash as she thought. The ensuing psychological war between the two unfolds like a sexual game of poker as each side's move is planned, predicted and counteracted based on gendered assumptions of the other's behaviour, which Fox's fourth-wall-breaking asides to the audience amplify with devilish delight. The romantic comedy may have been one of the biggest genres of 1990s and early-to-mid-2000s Hollywood, but few of them satirized heterosexual courtship as pointedly or hilariously as this.

22 - Barbershop by Tim Story (2002).

First and best of the Ice Cube-led Barbershop trilogy*, this is a smart, generous and uproariously funny comedy whose laughs, characters and structure are all powered by strong communal energy that's truly magical to behold. Following a colourful roster of barbershop employees - including Cedric The Entertainer's scene-stealing Eddie Walker - and their customers as they debate everything from Black history to sex and relationships, Barbershop anchors its comedy in a strong sense of community that makes every exchange, every behaviour, no matter how outrageous, feel like a genuine lived experience. A vibrant celebration of brotherhood and an at times quietly insightful look at urban social masculinity, you'll wish all visits to the barber were as exhilarating as this one.

21 - Love & Basketball by Gina Prince-Bythewood (2000).

From a seemingly predictable romantic premise involving two hotheaded people from different socioeconomic backgrounds united by a common passion for basketball, Gina Prince-Bythewood orchestrates a splendidly elaborate game of magnets across two decades, where each party's urges, feelings and frustrations are grown and developed with an attention to detail that gives them exceptional texture, depth and momentum. Fuelled by strong chemistry between Omar Epps and an electric Sanaa Lathan, the central relationship has a feeling of rounded experience that transcends both the romance and the sports genres and makes its protagonists one of the most convincing couples of 2000s cinema.

20 - Creed by Ryan Coogler (2015).

Ryan Coogler didn't just reinvigorate the Rocky franchise with a charismatic new lead, a return to the franchise's working-class underdog roots and a magnificent supporting turn from its former star; he interlinked these elements with a quietly moving depiction of family that crosses generational, racial and biological lines, and in doing so crafted a beautiful metatextual examination of legacy and redemption buoyed by a Jordan-Stallone tandem so organically dynamic it feels like the divinely-ordained culmination of two lifetimes' worth of work. Rarely has a torch been passed down so gracefully or with more self-evident crossover between on-screen and off-screen partnership.

19 - Second Coming by Debbie Tucker Green (2015).

Overlooked by filmgoers upon its release, this British diamond in the rough spotlights a troubled marriage marred by emotional suppression, mental illness and a possible mystical pregnancy. Directing Idris Elba and a revelatory, internally combustive Nadine Marshall, filmmaker and playwright Debbie Tucker Green sublimates her married couple's unexamined inner struggles into dark poetry of texture, voice and tone, whose primal narrative question is but a gateway to deeper psychological mysteries, all unravelled with superb emotional acuteness by its main acting duet.

18 - In Fabric by Peter Strickland (2019).

The inclusion of this film may raise some eyebrows, as while Marianne Jean-Baptiste's overworked divorcée may be the human with the most screentime, its true protagonist is the killer sentient dress she unknowingly buys to get back on the dating scene. Nevertheless, I contend this hypnotic surrealist satire can still be seen as a celebration of Black life simply for the unsentimental, worn-down humanity with which Jean-Baptiste brings out this middle-aged working mother's desire for temporary escape and the inconspicuous ease with which she conveys an entire life's worth of disappointments with mere glances. Sometimes, all you need is just one extremely talented actor to create deep meaning.

17 - Rafiki by Wanuri Kahiu (2018).

Initially banned in its native Kenya for its positive portrayal of the main characters' lesbian relationship, Rafiki is an energetic, blissful, radiant cry of freedom whose Romeo-and-Juliet plot, not only a denunciation of endemic homophobia, patriarchal norms and deeply-entrenched class divisions, allows its characters' forbidden romance to magnify Nairobi's extraordinarily vibrant youth and culture through vividly eye-popping cinematography and one of the best pop soundtracks of the past decade. Just you try to get Muthoni Drummer Queen's "Suzie Noma" out of your head after watching this. Just you try to even want to.

16 - Eve's Bayou by Kasi Lemmons (1997).

Shamefully ignored by audiences and media upon its release, Kasi Lemmons' stunning début explores the breakdown of a Black upper-class family in 1960s Louisiana as the titular 10-year-old Eve (Jurnee Smollett) witnesses gradual explosions of repressed resentments, sexual impulses and anxieties without fully comprehending them or their impacts. At times quasi-Bergmanian in its style, Lemmons' Southern Gothic drama nevertheless finds its own voice through its firm rooting in specific expressions of Creole culture as it travels through memory and trauma to question the reliability of human perception. Standout performances by Samuel L. Jackson and Debbi Morgan cement this overlooked work of art as one of the 1990s' best first features.

15 - Pariah by Dee Rees (2011).

Feature-length adaptation of her 2007 short of the same title, Dee Rees's semi-autobiographical coming-out tale is a painfully truthful learning experience for both its character - magnificently incarnated by Adepero Oduye - and its audience. From the forbidden excitement of lesbian nightclubbing, the spine-tingling little wonders of sharing oneself with another for the first time, to the suffocating agony of denying oneself and being denied by the very people whose affirmation you most need, Pariah is a Golgothan trek across personal and social identity, whose pains and pleasures ultimately contribute in equal measure to a final, hopeful liberation.

14 - Atlantics by Mati Diop (2019).

A righteous call to arms against Senegal's class divisions and the exploitation of workers; an intersectional screed against the patriarchal capitalist systems of power that keep poor Senegalese women in various states of subservience; a mournful lament for the countless souls lost at sea in search of a better life. Atlantics is all these things and more; equally angry and hopeful, sad and joyful, it interlinks horror, romance and social drama into an oniric tapestry of colours, music and sound that speaks to us in a language of its very own. With seductive gentleness, Mati Diop invites us into the lives of her characters and gives their hopes, dreams and disillusionments a mythological quality that only further enhances their profound humanity.

13 - The Fits by Anna Rose Holmer (2016).

Like Carol Morley's even less well-known 2015 mystery drama The Falling, Anna Rose Holmer investigates the trepidations of girlhood through a series of unexplained fits and faintings in an all-female space, with Morley's 1969 British girls' school substituted for a Black working-class neighbourhood's all-girl dancing troupe. As if to simultaneously illustrate and probe the famous hashtag #BlackGirlMagic's social implications, The Fits patiently studies a single black girl's position and identity within her community as her response to adult and peers' behaviour finds itself challenged by a crisis that upsets established order and makes children of us all (sound familiar?). Without making any overt political points, Holmer turns this confusion into audiovisual poetry whose every stanza is built on an increasingly urgent awareness of the pressures of growing up female, leading to one of the most visually arresting end sequences of the past 10 years.

12 - Carmen Jones by Otto Preminger (1959).

Dorothy Dandridge achieves cinematic immortality in this dazzling Technicolor adaptation of the Rodgers-Hammerstein musical, which ingeniously melded the grandiose melodies of Georges Bizet's opera with Black Southern rhythms and vocalizations to transpose Prosper Mérimée's Mediterranean tragedy to American cultural specificities. Though her singing voice is dubbed by Marilyn Horne, Dandridge nevertheless illuminates the screen with a defiant sensuality entirely of her own making that elevates Carmen above the hot-blooded temptress archetype she's come to represent and suggests an entire lifetime of passionate struggle. Pearl Bailey's unforgettable supporting turn as best friend Frankie - most notably her rendition of "Beat Out Dat Rhythm On A Drum" - also deserves special mention. At a time when few Hollywood films centered non-white people and even fewer took interest in them independent of their relationship to whiteness, Carmen Jones's cross-cultural energy stood out and it still holds up beautifully today.

11 - Girls Trip by Malcolm D. Lee (2017).

It's hard to articulate exactly what makes Girls Trip stand out in the sea of raunchy R-rated boys/girls'-night-out comedies that so pervaded the 2010s box-office. Is it the way it takes full advantage of its New Orleans setting without resorting to lazy clichés? Is it the natural, tangible chemistry between its four main players that underlines every exchange and interplay with a sense of lived history? Is it Tiffany Haddish's explosive livewire performance as Dina, and the communicative energy she exudes that elevates her far and above the "loose cannon" role typically expected in this subgenre? Is it Malcolm D. Lee's knack for knowing when to let his actors' energy guide the scene and when to bottle it in? Perhaps it's all four at the same time, with the added secret bonus of a screenplay that treats its characters with equal amounts of love, warmth and respect for their intelligence as well as our own, allowing the "oh-my-God-did-that-just-happen" shenanigans to look all the more outrageous and making the laughs all the bigger for it.

10 - To Sleep With Anger by Charles Burnett (1990).

Perhaps the most important living American filmmaker most people have never heard of, Charles Burnett spent the first twenty years of his distinguished career examining the emotional lives of Black Angeleno families in such films as My Brother's Wedding and the groundbreaking Killer Of Sheep (more on that later). In this film, his third feature and the first cast entirely with professional actors, a middle-class South Central family finds its life disrupted by the unexpected visit of old family friend Harry (Danny Glover, in his very best performance), whose invasive manners and ambiguous intentions unearth unresolved issues from the past and present. Mixing observational dramedy with the smallest hint of magic realism, To Sleep With Anger uses the tried-and-tested premise of the disruptive visitor to dissect family dynamics and the far-reaching ripples both collective and personal past into interpersonal relationships. By taking full advantage of the shift from his previous films' guerilla documentary aesthetics to a more conventional style, Burnett makes every tonal swerve, every behavioural change and every scene beat all the stranger, all the more uncomfortable and all the more exciting to experience. Alternately weird, familiar, puzzling, funny, shocking and awkward, this is an example of an American master at the height of his powers.

9 - Madeline's Madeline by Josephine Decker (2018).

Identity is on everyone's lips these days, but few artists mine the topic's meaning and implications as intelligently as Josephine Decker does through this intense, agoraphobic portrait of a mentally ill biracial teen who finds her innermost struggles appropriated by a vampiric acting coach. Carried by newcomer Helena Howard's awe-inspiring performance - one of this decade's very best - and filmed with unnerving precision, Madeline's Madeline is a dark existential reverie that exhorts us to re-examine our preconceptions on experience and performance, not just in art but in our everyday interactions with anyone whose life is different from ours.

8 - Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman (2018).

The best superhero film of a decade defined by them, Into The Spider-Verse draws its heart from its intelligent spin on empowerment metaphor inherent in superhero narratives; more than just another nerdy power fantasy, Miles Morales's story is one of family, solidarity and self-acceptance that embraces and magnifies ordinariness much more than it celebrates superheroic dominance. Through its magnificently disparate animation styles and subtle yet unmistakeable meta-narrative about diversity, this Spider-Man, more than any of its predecessors, speaks to the hearts of marginalized identities from all walks of life - as well as the awkward geek within us all.

7 - Shadows by John Cassavetes (1959).

The film that inaugurated a new era of American independent filmmaking - and one of the audiovisual arts' most groundbreaking careers - has the controlled anarchic energy of a masterful jazz improvisation; it zig-zags from one mood to another, never keeping us in the same place for long, and forces us to keep up with the twists and turns of its main sibling trio's inner lives as they navigate the complexities of social and racial identity in late-50s New York. Renowned for its unsensational examination of "passing" as white, the film is above all an engrossingly naturalistic portrait of life at the crossroads between private desire and group influence, where the self is kept in a state of constant reconfiguration by every exchange. Few movie characters feel so immediately alive or complicatedly human.

6 - Moonlight by Barry Jenkins (2016).

With tender care and impeccable attention to detail, Barry Jenkins turns the specificities of a poor gay black boy's emotional experiences into poignant testimonies of the human longing to be touched, seen and heard by another. Thanks to the superb efforts of Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes, and pitch-perfect complementary work from Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris, that longing has been fulfilled as rarely before in American cinema.

5 - The Last Black Man In San Francisco by Joe Talbot (2019).

Because gentrification's insidious racism is so central to the film's story, this bittersweet breakup letter to a beloved city may appear to contradict my previously established criteria. I would, however, argue that Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails, not content with merely denouncing the economic injustice visited upon Black working-class populations, makes the unjust situation a springboard for a much deeper dive into the relationships we build with each other and our surroundings through storytelling. At once radical and gentle, its powerfully empathetic observation of Jimmie and Montgomery's friendship and struggles to carve out spaces for them to live and express themselves makes it as moving a celebration of Black life as has ever been seen in the past decade.

4 - Tangerine by Sean Baker (2015).

The best film centering Black lives to have been released this decade, however, is this phenomenal act of digital love. Chronicling a day in the life of a recently-released transgender sex worker as she hunts down her unfaithful boyfriend/pimp with the reluctant assistance of her loving best friend, Sean Baker's film bursts with vivid detail that bring these characters' polyvalent, complicated humanity to gorgeous life, far above prevailing miserabilist clichés and media condescension. Powered by two of the best performances of the decade, this wild walk on L.A.'s mean streets is an invaluable work of cultural elevation.

3 - George Washington by David Gordon Green (2000).

To describe David Gordon Green's still-unsurpassed feature début as one of the most vital portraits of humanity ever added to the American film canon this millennium would be accurate, yet would scarcely do justice to the rapturous poetry with which the film probes the American consciousness. Following a group of predominantly Black children in a depressed North Carolina town as each process the consequences of an accidental killing, George Washington drifts across its various protagonists' lives in a stream-of-consciousness flow of images, sound and feelings that captures, more movingly than any other film of the 00s, the chaotic headspace of the juvenile mind. The lead performances from the non-professional cast, especially Donald Hoden and Damian Jewan Lee, are among the best ever given by child actors; unaffectedly forthright in that unfakeable way only kids can be, they convey in simple, short lines and single gazes more emotional truth than most trained actors deliver in entire monologues.

2 - Killer Of Sheep by Charles Burnett (1978).

It's one of the most important films in American cinema history and it took 20 years for it to get a proper wide theatrical release outside of museums and festivals. Shot guerilla-style without permits and starring Charles Burnett's own friends and neighbours, Killer Of Sheep documents the daily frustrations, distractions and dreams of a working-class Black community from L. A.'s Watts neighbourhood, with special attention on Stan (Henry G. Sanders) and the toll his job at the slaughterhouse is taking on his marriage and mental health. With no real "plot" to speak of and very sporadic dialogue, Burnett eschews traditional storytelling in favour of a documentary approach that uncovers his characters' inner lives through silences, music, unexpected cuts and careful framing of the actors' body movements in both still and handheld shots. Though the film is short, the characters' arcs static and the story seemingly devoid of any grand overarching idea, the treasure trove of emotion and experience Burnett discovers in each shot make its viewing experience one that resonates louder and deeper with each following day.

1 - 35 Shots Of Rum by Claire Denis (2009).

The simplest scenarios often yield the most complex emotions: a young woman falling in love with a sensitive young man, a widowed father whose young adult daughter is about to fly the nest, a veteran train conductor slowly realizing his job may end up being all he has left... Claire Denis unifies all three scenarios in a single narrative story about the subtle change in the close relationship between a middle-aged man (Alex Descas) and his daughter (Mati Diop)** and creates one of the most transcendently human films I have ever had the joy of experiencing. Lionel and Joséphine's relationship is practically devoid of what we might think of as "drama" in fiction or real life; no shouting matches, no slamming of doors, no sarcastic jabs, no whining or scolding, but instead a quiet observation of the subtle shifts in everyday gestures and behaviours that commemorate the approaching end of a life lived together. Underlined by the bittersweet glow of Agnès Godard's magnificently-lit Parisian sundowns and the Tindersticks' gentle harmonies, the silent emotional battles waged within these sublimely-realized characters' hearts make every interaction feel like the most important happening in the world. It is one of the most vibrant celebrations of life - Black or otherwise - ever put to screen.

*Though if we take into account the Queen Latifah-led spin-off Beauty Shop, doesn't that make it a Barbershop quartet?
**Inspired by Yasujiro Ozu's acclaimed 1949 classic Late Spring, still unseen by me as of this writing.