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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Dear White People

DEAR WHITE PEOPLE (Justin Simien). 108 minutes. Opens Friday (November 7). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNNN


There are people in America who insist that the country is post-racial, and that’s what made it okay for them to go out in blackface on Halloween. They are idiots, and Dear White People has had enough of them.

Set at a fictional Ivy League school where racial tensions are creeping toward a flashpoint, writer/director Justin Simien’s vital, immediate comedy considers contemporary attitudes toward race, gender and sexuality through a cast of lively, engaging characters.

Favouring Spike Lee’s School Daze over Do The Right Thing (which he quotes only in the service of a Tyler Perry joke), Simien builds a complex environment of clashing motivations and desires, each marked by sharp dialogue and believable conflicts.

Everybody Hates Chris’s Tyler James Williams and Veronica Mars’s Tessa Thompson are particularly adept at investing Simien’s zingers with exactly the right amount of righteous condemnation, but the entire cast is game.

See? Social awareness can be fun!

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