After the death of his father, T’Challa returns home to the African nation of Wakanda to take his rightful place as king. When a powerful enemy suddenly reappears, T’Challa’s mettle as king — and as Black Panther — gets tested when he’s drawn into a conflict that puts the fate of Wakanda and the entire world at risk. Faced with treachery and danger, the young king must rally his allies and release the full power of Black Panther to defeat his foes and secure the safety of his people.
“Black Panther is the most political movie ever produced by Marvel Studios, both in its very existence—it’s the most expensive movie to have ever starred an almost entirely black cast—and in the questions its story raises. Indeed, the ideas are almost too big: There are times when you wish they, and the characters, had more space to breathe.
The best superhero films don’t transcend the genre as much as they embrace it in all its respects. With its aesthetic ambition, depth of imagination, and genuinely challenging themes, Black Panther belongs with this group. It doesn’t just capture the essential qualities of the character, it expands on the concept itself, standing as a film that matters for what it says as much as what it is.
Black Panther could have been just another Marvel romp—a fun but ultimately disposable entry in the studio’s catalogue. But Ryan Coogler and company had the power, and perhaps the responsibility, to do much more. And they did.” Jamelle Bouie, Slate
One of the year’s best films, and one that transcends the superhero genre to emerge as an epic of operatic proportions.
Odile Henderson, rogerebert.com
What makes Black Panther feel different from other Marvel movies is that the world it imagines, the fights it insists must be fought, are grounded in real questions with immediate analogues that harken back to an entire discourse of black activism and thought… The most radical thing a Black Panther movie could have done is ask what Wakanda means—and what it owes—to the race. And that’s what Coogler’s passionate, funny, dexterous movie asks, over and over again, both to its characters and to its audience.
K Austin Collins, The Ringer
Ryan Coogler
Chadwick Boseman, Michael B Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright
USA
2018
English
Book Tickets
Tuesday February 28
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Executive Producer
Victoria Alonso, Jeffrey Chernov, Louis D’Esposito, Stan Lee, Nate Moore
Producer
Kevin Feige
Screenwriter
Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole
Cinematography
Rachel Morrison
Editor
Debbie German, Michael P Shawver
Original Music
Ludwig Göransson
Production Design
Hannah Beachler
Catch More Black History Month Programming
Also in Icons
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings
This boisterous comedy about a breakaway barnstorming Black baseball team in the 1930s should be better known. It's an entertaining gloss on one enterprising ball player's resourceful response to segregated leagues, with Star Wars' Billy Dee Williams.
Under the Cherry Moon (35mm)
Prince is Christopher Tracy, a gigolo on the French Riviera, determined to seduce $50 million heiress Kristin Scott Thomas (!). The pop star's directorial debut is a quirky, fun throwback to old school Hollywood glamour, with knobs on.
Dispatches
Dear Jackie (Free Screening)
Henri Pardo's film is a cinematic letter to Jackie Robinson, the first African American player in Major League Baseball and a civil rights activist who broke the colour barrier when he joined the minor-league Montreal Royals in 1946. For a short time, the impossible seemed possible in a segregated North America.
James Baldwin Abroad: Istanbul - Paris - London
These three short docs, from 1968 - 1973, offer sharp, piercing glimpses of Baldwin in private and public, sometimes in repose and relaxed but more often holding forth, embroiled in the thorny discourse of racial politics, identity and self expression.
"This Time It's Personal" Films by Camille Billops & James Hatch (Programme 1)
Trailblazing artist and polymath Camille Billops and her partner James Hatch were courageous independent filmmakers who chronicled the ups and downs of their personal lives and family histories, and found in them the temperature of their times.
"This Time It's Personal" Films by Camille Billops & James Hatch (Programme 2)
The second programme in our short selection of independent films by Camille Bishops and James Hatch includes what is probably their masterpiece, Finding Christa, a deeply personal film about Camille's relationship with the daughter she gave up for adoption as a child.
