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    ‘As They Made Us’ Review: If the Apple Falls, Who Retrieves It?

    A dutiful daughter navigates the consequences of her parents’ failings in Mayim Bialik’s engagingly compassionate directorial debut.,For her directorial debut, Mayim Bialik — the neuroscientist, sitcom star, and finalist for the “Jeopardy!” host gig — hewed to what she knew: reckoning with the legacy of volatile parents.At the start of her smartly observed, well-cast drama “As They Made Us,” a young Abigail and her brother, Nathan, listen from the back seat of a car while their parents downshift into a nasty argument. It’s clearly not a one-off. The youngsters appear in flashbacks illuminating the power of their parents’ undiagnosed mental illness to shape the adults they become — especially Abigail (Dianna Agron).Dustin Hoffman and Candice Bergen portray the parents as they were — when eruptions of violence and stubborn denial were routine — and as they are now. Eugene is suffering a degenerative condition that exacerbates confusion; Barbara, so uncomfortable with vulnerability, doubles down on control even as she leans on Abigail.Abigail has two children, has been divorced a year and is a columnist for a glossy magazine, The Modern Jew. She’s smart, overtaxed and a textbook dutiful daughter. Decades earlier, Nathan (Simon Helberg) high-tailed it and remains estranged.Bialik gets adroit work from the ensemble. Helberg brings moving nuance to Nathan’s sullen reckoning. Justin Chu Cary keeps Abigail’s love interest on the grown-up side of what could have been a too-good-to-be true character. Still, even with veterans like Hoffman and Bergen, it’s Agron’s film. She and Bialik make Abigail’s filial loyalty as sympathetic as it is exasperating, and as rife with difficult truths about aging as it is understatedly hopeful about growing up.As They Made UsRated R for abusive and explosive language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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    ‘Return to Space’ Review: Eyes on the Skies

    Platitudes prevail in this overlong documentary about the partnership between NASA and SpaceX.Glowing with grandiose pronouncements and uplifting sentiment, “Return to Space,” a draggy documentary about America’s first manned spaceflight since 2011, could be easily repurposed as promotional material for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.This is in part because the company’s decades-long effort to design a reusable rocket is presented almost entirely in altruistic terms, the tests and failures cushioned by a cloud of for-all-mankind babble. NASA’s space shuttle program might have ended 11 years ago, but the need to blast our astronauts into the thermosphere (and onto the International Space Station) remains. Enter Musk, whose belief that humans will be a “multi-planet species” — and whose company was the only viable option — made him the perfect candidate for a $1.5 billion government contract to deliver rockets to NASA.While the filmmakers, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, struggle to wring drama from weather delays and anxious suits clustered around consoles, we hang out, pleasantly enough, with the two delighted astronauts (Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken) who will make the flight. Footage from multiple sources (including video diaries and NASA space cameras) is woven together with interviews containing more starry-eyed boosterism than compelling information.Aside from a few grumpy lawmakers, “Return to Space” is notable for its almost total lack of naysayers regarding this public-private collaboration. Ignoring the transactional in favor of the inspirational, the film pays no heed to SpaceX’s commercial endeavors — watching it, you’d think making money was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.“We made a point of humanizing Elon,” Chin says in the production notes. Yet the partnership’s uninvestigated details seem consequential, and skeptics might be forgiven their anxiety about what tech companies could get up to in outer space. We’ve seen what they’ve done on Earth.Return to SpaceNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘Aline’ Review: Tale as Odd as Time

    Celine Dion’s life story gets an unconventional telling from the French filmmaker Valérie Lemercier in this creative but flawed biopic.The best compliment one can give the French serio-comic filmmaker Valérie Lemercier’s “Aline,” a biopic of Celine Dion in which Lemercier plays a fictionalized version of the pop star from infancy through widowhood, is that it evokes the disorientation of discovering the singer as she was on her first album: a 13-year-old with snaggleteeth. The movie’s passion is incredible — but, boy, is it embodied in something awkward.There is barely time to adjust to the sight of the adult Lemercier shrunken through cinematic trickery to the size of a child before we’re forced to grapple with the dawning awareness that this tribute is intended to be heartfelt. “Aline” is no prank, even though the cinematography is as static as a Saturday Night Live skit. The director and her co-writer, Brigitte Buc, whisk through Dion’s timeline with efficiency. Lemercier observes the singer, here renamed Aline Dieu, as she shifts from ballads belted to her mother (Danielle Fichaud) to ones aimed at her Svengali and husband-to-be (Sylvain Marcel), who is sincerely presented as her one great love. Lemercier trots out Dion’s famous outfits and interviews, her 1998 Academy Awards performance of “My Heart Will Go On” and, when the action shifts to Dion’s Las Vegas residencies, does a quite good job imitating the star’s coltish, unpredictable dance moves.All “Aline” needs is a point. The closest thing to one is Lemercier’s insistence that Dion wasn’t simply a larger-than-life icon but a mortal, too, with relatable worries about her children, her sleep schedule and, er, getting lost in her 40-room mansion. To this end, in a film crammed with covers (splendidly sung by Victoria Sio), Lemercier opens and closes with “Ordinaire,” the Robert Charlebois song: “I am not a circus freak,” her star sings, adding, “I’d like to be understood.”AlineRated PG-13 for grace notes of sexual situations and language. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Review: The Director Lloyd Kaufman Returns With a Shakespeare Spoof

    Kaufman, the king of lowbrow, is back with this lusty parody.Should you be among those lamenting the lack of whale feces and exploding genitalia coming to a theater near you, not to worry: Troma Entertainment hears your pain. And with “#ShakespearesShitstorm” — billed, I kid you not, as a musical adaptation of “The Tempest” — the durable director Lloyd Kaufman lobs multiple notions at the screen to see what sticks. In a movie held together with this many slimy fluids, pretty much everything does.A good-natured dig at addiction, Big Pharma and the judgmentalism of liberal elites, the movie follows the efforts of a wronged scientist (Kaufman) to exact revenge on the sleazy head of an avaricious drug company (Abraham Sparrow). A lucid plot, though, is surplus to requirements as we’re dragged into a debauched shipboard party (cue the flatulent whales) and an interminable crack house orgy, while Kaufman and company gleefully lampoon social-media warriors and cultural appropriation. Wiggling women and tumescent men bump up against a revolting spoof of the elevator scene from “The Shining” (1980), and an animated sequence from the talented Josh Stifter briefly raises the tone. Excrement and other forms of ejaculate spurt continuously, suggesting that this bona fide abomination was even more disgusting to act in than to watch.It’s all quite insane, if par for the course for Troma, which has been churning out these low-budget curios for close to 50 years now. As sitcoms are to TV and Pink Floyd is to vinyl, Kaufman’s film feels made for a more nostalgic medium and a more substance-enhanced viewing experience. Its makers, however, deserve praise simply for living up to that doozy of a title.#ShakespearesShitstormNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Girl and the Spider’ Review: Where Did I Put That Thing?

    The twin brothers Ramon and Silvan Zürcher have created a wonderfully discombobulating feature about an apartment move.With “The Girl and the Spider,” the Swiss filmmakers Ramon and Silvan Zürcher, the identical twins behind the exceptional debut “The Strange Little Cat,” have made their second feature in a row that invites viewers to get lost in an apartment — or in this case, more than one.Set over two days, “The Girl and the Spider,” in its simplest outlines, tells the story of how Mara (Henriette Confurius) helps Lisa (Liliane Amuat), her roommate, move into a place of her own. We spend time in the new apartment and meet others assisting with chores, then return to the old place (and some friends’ apartment on a lower floor) for a farewell party that night. Everybody wakes up the next day burned out. By sunset, Mara and Lisa’s friendship will have entered a new phase.But a synopsis could barely describe how thoroughly the Zürchers — the credits list Ramon as director but call it “a film by” both of them — have confounded a sense of the ordinary. It’s not just that certain behavior seems off. (Mara professes to “lie without batting an eyelid.”) The shooting and editing are wildly unconventional.Entrances go unestablished. Shots fixate on odd details. Cuts react to offscreen noises and dialogue. (The clamorous sound design is as offbeat as the visuals.) Flashbacks and flights of fancy arrive out of the blue. The 1980s French hit “Voyage Voyage” — heard in bits on piano, then in pop form, then on piano again — becomes a disorienting motif.The movie opens with a shot of a floor plan that Mara has made for Lisa (she notes that a malfunction briefly scrambled the PDF), and the Zürchers in effect ask viewers to map their way through a tangle of spaces and relationships, with flirtations and suspicions peeking through the corners. The film demands and rewards repeat viewings; it’s different, and more entrancing, every time.The Girl and the SpiderNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘La Mami’ Review: Tough Love

    This documentary about the den mother of dancers at a Mexico City cabaret is vérité at its best.At the Cabaret Barba Azul, women get paid to dance and drink with the male patrons, a custom that dates back to the 1930s. In the beautifully-rendered documentary “La Mami,” the director and cinematographer Laura Herrero Garvín (“The Swirl”) immerses us in the behind-the-scenes world of these dancers through the lens of their den mother: Doña Olga. Like them, Doña Olga also used to spend her nights dancing for pesos, but after 45 years working various jobs at the cabaret to support her five children, she has settled into her post in the club’s dressing room-bathroom combo. There she regulates the distribution of toilet paper with an iron fist, and doles out a charming mix of motherly nurturing and fierce rebukes. Like this bit of poetry: “Men are only good for two things: for nothing, and for money.”Garvín’s adept camerawork allows the story to unfold so seamlessly in its vérité style, that the film emanates the magic of a scripted drama without revealing any noticeable interference. And it creates a palpable depth of intimacy too: from Doña Olga waving incense and whispering prayers throughout the club before the doors open, to the nervous new girl Priscilla putting on makeup in the mirror.The triumph of “La Mami” is that in depicting how Doña Olga and the Barba Azul dancers navigate a job where male pleasure dominates, the film does not look down on them, but instead revels in their humanity. And in so doing, this remarkable portrayal of female friendship offers a poignant, elemental take on the lives of working-class women in urban Mexico today.La MamiNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Nehemiah Persoff, Actor With a Familiar Face (and Voice), Dies at 102

    His most prominent roles included three tenderly caring parents, but he was most associated with the dapper gangsters he portrayed in the movies and on television.Nehemiah Persoff, a ubiquitous character actor whose gravelly voice and knack for conveying an air of menace magnified his portrayals of a bevy of sinister types, most notably a half-dozen Prohibition-era gangsters, died on Tuesday in San Luis Obispo, Calif. He was 102. The cause was heart failure, his grandson, Joey Persoff, said.For decades Mr. Persoff was one of most recognizable faces on television, by face if not by name; he was seen on hundreds of shows, beginning in the late 1940s. He usually played a supporting character, sometimes kindly, sometimes malevolent, but, given his gift for dialect, frequently with an undefined foreign accent.He appeared on such durable series of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s as “Gunsmoke,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Route 66,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Columbo,” and he continued into the 1990s, with parts on “Law & Order” and “Chicago Hope.”Mr. Persoff, a native of Jerusalem who emigrated to the United States when he was 9, was in real life an amiable father of four who was married to the same woman for seven decades, and who in retirement became an accomplished painter.His most prominent roles included three tenderly caring parents: a Jewish refugee escaping the Nazis and hoping to reunite with his daughter in Havana in the 1976 film “Voyage of the Damned”; the father of an Orthodox Jewish girl in early-20th-century Poland who poses as a boy so that she can study in a yeshiva, in Barbra Streisand’s “Yentl” (1983); and the voice of the father of Fievel Mousekewitz, the Russian Jewish mouse who emigrates to the United States to escape marauding cats, in the 1986 animated feature “An American Tail” and its sequels.Yet he was most associated with the dapper gangsters he portrayed in the movies and on television. He was the underworld boss Johnny Torrio in the 1959 film “Al Capone,” which starred Rod Steiger in the title role. In the TV series “The Untouchables,” he played two different real-life gangsters: Jake Guzik, the financial brains of Capone’s bootleg liquor gang, in a few episodes, and Waxey Gordon, New York’s king of illicit beer, in a 1960 episode in which he gleefully aimed a Tommy gun into a competitor’s barrels.His most memorable supporting role may have been his outsize parody of a mobster, Little Bonaparte, in the classic Billy Wilder comedy “Some Like It Hot” (1959). Two of his lines from that movie are often quoted by film buffs.In one, addressing a mob gathering disguised as an opera lovers’ convention, he says: “In the last fiscal year we made a hundred an’ twelve million dollars before taxes … only we didn’t pay no taxes!”And after a hit man pops out of a huge birthday cake and machine-guns another mobster, played by George Raft, and his entourage, Mr. Persoff tells an inquiring detective, “There was something in that cake that didn’t agree with ’em.”Mr. Persoff as the real-life mobster Jake Guzik in a 1962 episode of the TV series “The Untouchables.” He portrayed the gangster Waxey Gordon in another episode.Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty ImagesMr. Persoff once said he loved working on “The Untouchables” because he could lock horns with Elliot Ness, the federal agent played with righteous hauteur by Robert Stack.“Bob Stack was so nose-in-the-air stuck up, he was so correct and superior, so aristocratic, that without any effort on my part it brought out the rebel in me,” he told the magazine Cinema Retro. “It struck a vein of anger in me, anger which in my mind is such an important part of what makes a gangster.”Nehemiah Persoff was born in Jerusalem on Aug. 2, 1919, during the years when the territory was transitioning from Ottoman rule to a British mandate. His father, Shmuel, a silversmith, jeweler and art teacher, decided that his prospects would improve in America and emigrated on his own. After six years he brought over his wife, Puah (Holman) Persoff, a homemaker, and his three sons and two daughters.It was the start of the Depression, and the family lived in a cold-water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, though they eventually moved to the Bronx.Nehemiah attended the Hebrew Technical Institute to study the electrician’s trade, and his first job was as a signal maintenance worker on the old IND subway line. It paid him $38 a week, more than his father earned.His introduction to acting happened by chance: He was asked to perform a walk-on in a play that was the highlight of a Zionist organization’s function. The experience planted a notion, and after completing three years in the stateside Army, he took a leave from subway work and began studying acting.Mr. Persoff was among the first students at the Actors Studio, where his teachers were Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, proponents of method acting. His fellow students included Julie Harris, Martin Balsam, Cloris Leachman and Kim Hunter.His first bit part was in the 1948 film noir “Naked City,” but it was another small part that brought him to widespread attention: He was the silent cabdriver in the memorable taxi scene in “On the Waterfront” (1954). His face appears briefly after one of film lore’s most famous conversations, when Marlon Brando tells Rod Steiger: “I could’ve had class, I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been a somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”Mr. Persoff was usually cast in small supporting parts, but he often turned them into gems of characterization. One was Leo, the crooked accountant, in Humphrey Bogart’s last picture, “The Harder They Fall” (1956). He coolly tells a furious Bogart that out of the $1 million gate for a championship fight, the story’s overmatched boxer will receive $49.07.In 1951, Mr. Persoff married Thia Persov, a distant relation who had been a nurse with the Palmach, a Zionist military group, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. She died of cancer last year. In addition to his grandson, Mr. Persoff is survived by three sons, Jeffrey, Dan and Perry; a daughter, Dahlia; and four granddaughters. He lived in the town of Cambria on the central Californian coast.In Barbra Streisand’s “Yentl” (1983), Mr. Persofff played the father of an Orthodox Jewish girl (Ms. Streisand) who poses as a boy so that she can study in a yeshiva.United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock PhotoWhile acting in Hollywood, Mr. Persoff kept his hand in live theater. In 1959, he starred on Broadway as the newspaper editor and essayist Harry Golden in a short-lived adaptation of Mr. Golden’s folksy book “Only in America.” It was the last of his more than a dozen Broadway appearances.In California, he starred as a cantankerous socialist in his 80s in the Herb Gardner comedy “I’m Not Rappaport” and as the milkman Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” And for almost two decades he appeared as Tevye’s creator, the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, in a one-man show for which Mr. Persoff adapted five of the writer’s fables.In 1975, he was awarded the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his supporting role in “The Dybbuk” at the Mark Taper Forum.When high blood pressure and other health problems forced him to reduce his workload, Mr. Persoff took up painting, studying in Los Angeles and producing watercolors that have been exhibited in galleries in Northern California. He kept painting until the last week of his life. In 2021 he published a memoir, “The Many of Faces of Nehemiah.”Beyond dialects and accents, he had a telling philosophy about acting. “If I’m playing a good guy, I’ll try to show that he has some bad in him,” he once said. “If I’m playing a bad guy, I’ll give him some dignity and love.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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    One Last Takeaway From ‘The Slap’: Leave Black Women’s Hair Alone

    Lost in the Oscars fray is the hurt inflicted when a group is denigrated for a laugh. Chris Rock, who has examined this issue in a documentary, should have known better.While the Slap Heard Round the World has been vigorously debated and dissected since Will Smith confronted Chris Rock at the Oscars, there was more to the incident than its abrupt physicality.Rock’s joke, and Jada Pinkett Smith’s resulting eyeroll, echoed even more thunderously for Black women. Her glare encapsulated the fatigue and frustration that so many of us deal with in the complex daily feat of simply wearing our hair as we like. That Chris Rock would point to a Black woman’s hair for a joke left me breathless, and I wasn’t alone.“When Black women’s hair is mocked by comedians like Rock, he ushers in the everyday forms of microaggressive hatred against Black women that normalized blatant discrimination,” Ralina Joseph, a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the director of the Center for Communication, Difference and Equity, said in an email interview.Black women’s hair has been the object of scrutiny, derision and ridicule in American society since it’s been growing out of our heads. Thanks to standards of beauty that for too long excluded us, we are arguably the largest demographic in the country whose hair is continually policed. Court cases document fights against school districts and corporations trying to govern how we can wear our hair. A segment of people who don’t live with it, in all its iterations of textures and lengths, somehow wants to dictate how and when it’s pretty, professional or unkempt.Distaste for Black hair seeps into our everyday lives: Just last month, the House of Representatives passed the CROWN Act, banning discrimination against natural hair in hiring, public housing placement and public access accommodations. Let that sink in: Exclusionary actions stemming from disdain toward our hairstyles are so pervasive, they require legislation.Nowadays, visibility and a touch of glamorization in mainstream media (I’m lookin’ at you, Beyoncé), have fostered a growing fascination with our manes — a double-edged sword. Bosses scrutinize or give it a shout-out, strangers try to paw or photograph it, friends and frenemies praise or judge it — even Tinder prospects weigh in on it.Academic studies have outlined how strongly the identity of many Black women is tied to their hair. Not having the type of hair that’s affirmed and considered “womanly” in the culture at large can dent one’s sense of self. And feeling that what’s considered a key part of womanhood needs altering to be accepted, especially from childhood, makes it hard to see one’s image as positive.The Altercation Between Will Smith and Chris RockThe Incident: The Oscars were derailed when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, who made a joke about Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.His Speech: Moments after the onstage altercation, Mr. Smith won the Oscar for best actor. Here’s what he said in his acceptance speech.The Aftermath: Mr. Smith, who the academy said refused to leave following the incident, apologized to Mr. Rock the next day after the academy denounced his actions.A Triumph Tempered: Mr. Smith owned Serena and Venus Williams’s story in “King Richard.” Then he stole their moment at the Oscars.What Is Alopecia?: Ms. Smith’s hair loss condition played a major role in the incident.Since it’s hard to separate our image from our hair, poking fun at a Black hair style is an easy way to get a laugh while devaluing Black women. Witness Jamie Foxx lampooning us as Wanda on “In Living Color” and Martin Lawrence as Sheneneh. It’s incomprehensible that a Black comic would reach for it in such a high-profile setting as the Oscars — especially a man so closely associated with a film about Black women’s hair struggles.Not only did Rock produce and narrate the 2009 documentary “Good Hair,” which brought Black hair culture to the big screen, but he created it with his own daughters in mind. In the opening, he recounts how one of his girls asked him, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?” Onscreen, he speaks to a range of women, including celebrities like Raven-Symoné, who explain that when they relaxed their hair, the goal was also about making society comfortable with them.Chris Rock in “Good Hair,” a documentary he narrated and produced.Roadside AttractionsWhile the film could have delved further into how Black women have thrived in a beauty culture (including a hair-care industry) that has rarely included them, it illuminated our struggle to audiences that may not have known one existed. It’s hard to understand how he could help bring that gem of a film to life and yet take a swipe at a Black woman’s hair. Did he so quickly forget the lessons of that film, which seemed to recognize how American society “otherizes” us and our tresses?Or, worse still, did the lessons never matter? Rock has a history of dogging not just Black women, but the entire Black community, or as Joseph calls it, “in-group punching down.”“Despite a brief ‘Good Hair’ moment. where he celebrated (and mocked) Black women, his punching down has also been broadly anti-Black woman,” she noted.Through his career, Rock has demonstrated a penchant for belittling and mischaracterizing Black women, from his ex-wife to female romantic partners in general. In a 1997 episode of “The Chris Rock Show,” he skewered Black women’s need to join the Million Woman March to his guest — Jada Pinkett Smith, a march participant.There’s another sensitive aspect to Rock’s dig at Pinkett Smith. In interviews and on her Facebook series “Red Table Talk,” she has chronicled her painful ordeal with alopecia, a condition that disproportionately affects Black women. She initially concealed her hair loss under wigs. That she decided to shave her head and reveal the reason was to be commended, not jabbed at. To be clear: Whether Rock knew of her condition or not, the joke wasn’t hurtful only because Pinkett Smith deals with alopecia (an affliction to which “Good Hair” even devotes special attention). The insult added an extra layer of hurt, especially because Black women can be harsh on ourselves about hair, amid social pressures and Eurocentric beauty standards that we’ve internalized, often to an extreme degree.Generations of Black American women recall weekend afternoons spent watching an iron comb glow like molten lava on the stove burner. We waited for our mothers to wield the hot comb like a weapon, ready to press our thicket of coils into submission to make us more culturally palatable. Even at a young age, I wondered who I was supposed to be impressing.When I was deemed old enough, I “leveled up” to chemical straighteners that would frequently blister my scalp — all for a flouncy bob I detested. “Beauty is pain,” my hairdresser would chirp as she kneaded the chemical cream into my roots and I winced. In my mid-20s, I decided beauty wasn’t worth that pain, so I chopped off most of my hair and have since maintained a very short, natural style.“When Black women’s hair features as the butt of jokes, the very real and myriad forms of multiple marginalization against Black women is erased and even justified,” Joseph noted. “It hurts.”Even though the jokes at the expense of us and our hair predate Rock, we don’t need him to lead the way in turning up the savagery of the practice, let alone on Hollywood’s biggest evening.Like the director Jane Campion’s misstep a couple weeks ago at another awards show (which, sadly, also involved the Williams sisters, one of the focuses of the Will Smith film “King Richard”), this takedown of a Black woman stings even more for having been unleashed by someone who should know better — in Rock’s case, as a Black father of daughters; in Campion’s, as a woman who’s also probably dealt with sexist professional slights. But the result each time was the same: Black women were expected to smile and take the stab.In one sense, the entire Oscars to-do, and its flurry of embarrassment and apologies, could have been avoided by choosing not to drag a Black woman down by her hair. Yet for too many and for too long, it has felt irresistible not to mess with it, mess with us.So to anyone who ever feels the urge to mock, I’ll reframe Will Smith’s warning at the show: Keep the mention of Black women’s hair out of your mouth. More