Arts & Culture

The 14th annual African Film Festival invites St. Louisans to see eight of Africa’s most acclaimed films on the big screen. Highlights include two Kenyan films, the controversial “Rafiki,” which was banned in its own country, and “Supa Moda,” a family-friendly film that one critic called “the most important superhero movie you’ll see this year.”

Allegations against R. Kelly have finally exploded into the #MeToo era with Lifetime’s “Surviving R. Kelly.” But the singer’s troubling behavior can be traced back decades. “There was a lot of sexual energy around Kelly that we as young people felt was a little bit dark and a little bit inappropriate and a little bit taboo,” says Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., who studies race, gender and popular culture at Washington University in St. Louis. In the early 1990s, McCune was a student at Kenwood Academy, the Chicago magnet school Kelly had attended just a few years before — and a classmate to one of Kelly’s earliest accusers.

“Stan Lee was a man of contradictions,” says comics scholar Peter Coogan, “self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating; a great collaborator and someone who took credit for others’ work; hugely successful except when his endeavors crashed in failure. But unlike the superheroes, neither side was secret.”

One of the many skilled artisans behind the enchanting visuals in Pixar movies is alumnus Chris Bernardi. On the Oscar Award–winning “Coco,” Bernardi served as set supervisor, leading a team of designers who beautifully bring to life a boy’s dream against the backdrop of Mexico’s Day of the Dead.

When Sam Coster, AB ’12, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at age 23, he knew his life had to change. A game developer who made irreverent endless runners for mobile, Coster and his brothers, who run the game development studio Butterscotch Shenanigans, decided to create their most imaginative and ambitious game to date, Crashlands.

Frankenstein’s monster has a pervasive influence on popular culture. Here, we take a look at some of the illustrations and comic books that have taken the creature as their subject.

Through her blog, Scary Mommy, and two parenting books, best-selling author Jill Smokler (right), BFA ’99, takes a look at parenting in all its irritating, sleepless, joyful and hilarious glory.

Documentary filmmaker and The Daily Show senior producer Sara Taksler’s, AB ’01, latest film, Tickling Giants, is about how political satire shook the halls of power in Egypt after the Arab Spring.

In 2004, Arden Farhi, AB ’07, was a student volunteer for the Bush-Kerry debate. He was assigned to work with CBS and knew he’d found his calling. Now he travels the country and the world producing segments for CBS News’ chief White House correspondent.