Jeanne Moreau and Marguerite Duras: on Film, Love, and Female Friendship
Cet amour-là (Josée Dayan, 2001) was not especially well received on either the festival circuit or commercially, but there is…
Mischief in the Magic Castle: On Sean Baker’s ‘The Florida Project’
It is said that well-behaved women seldom make history. In Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, the badly behaved ones make…
Review: ‘Princess Cyd’
There is a particular way that teenage girls are imagined in cinema: situated in seemingly endless summers, they waft about…
Touch And Its Hesitations in Ildikó Enyedi’s ‘On Body and Soul’
Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul (2017) is an exercise in counterpoint. From its opening sequences, the film unravels a…
Review: ‘Beach Rats’
In her first feature, It Felt Like Love (2013), Eliza Hittman explored a young Brooklyn girl’s troubled life as she…
Review: ‘On The Beach At Night Alone’
Hong Sangsoo’s On the Beach At Night Alone is in fact two films. Shot by different cinematographers (Kim Hyung-koo and Park…
Review: ‘Redoubtable’
In her memoir Un an après, the purported basis for Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable, the late Anne Wiazemsky recalls her astonishment, at…
A Calling of the Ancestors? Jill Soloway’s ‘I Love Dick’
“Unfortunately, most films by women aren’t that good.” This declaration, made just two thirds of the way through the first…
Portrait of Sarah Turner
Review: ‘Okja’
Much like Okja the genetically modified pig, Okja the film had a controversial and ground-breaking genesis. It is one of…
Review: ‘Mary Shelley’
Haifaa al-Mansour’s Mary Shelley suggests that the eponymous writer’s classic novel Frankenstein is the result of the influence of men…
Review: Top of the Lake: China Girl
TW: Rape Top of the Lake was brilliant, but it didn’t always make for easy viewing. Any story in which…
Choreographies of Relation: Female Subjectivity in ‘A Woman, a Part’ (2016)
Elisabeth Subrin’s A Woman, a Part opens with an image of three figures in single file, arms reaching upwards in…
Review: ‘Wind River’
TW: rape The idea of making a thriller based around the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women is startling:…
Cinematic Riots: Feminism and Surrealism in Germaine Dulac’s ‘La Coquille et le Clergyman’
Germaine Dulac’s La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman) was arguably the first surrealist film ever made. Admired…
Review: ‘The Beguiled’
Virginia, 1864. The Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies – five pupils of varying ages, under the care of Miss Martha…
Black soul, white bodies: rethinking the music of ‘Big Little Lies’
TW: Mentions of slavery and domestic abuse In the climactic scene of Big Little Lies’ first season finale, the five…
Portrait of Marie-Hélène Dozo
‘Girls rule, and rule, and rule’: revisiting ICA Biennale of Independent Film and Video 1997, ‘The Raw and The Cooked’, curated by B. Ruby Rich
In 1997, the ICA invited American queer feminist critic, curator and funder B. Ruby Rich to curate the fourth ICA…
Review: ‘Wonder Woman’
Wonder Woman has carried a particularly heavy weight of expectation on her shoulders right from the announcement of the film….
Going Gothic: Anticipating Sofia Coppola’s ‘The Beguiled’
In March 2016, Variety reported that Sofia Coppola was set to write and direct a remake of Don Siegel’s 1971…