TIFF Review: Alex Ross Perry’s ‘Her Smell’
Alex Ross Perry’s latest feature, Her Smell, focuses on the career of a rock star, Becky (played by Elisabeth Moss),…
Of Broken Bones and Ecstatic Dreams: On Chloé Zhao’s ‘The Rider’
When Lupita Nyong’o ascended the stage to accept her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2014, the straight-out-of-drama-school newcomer…
Expansive Territories: Remembering Kathleen Collins
Kathleen Conwell Collins Prettyman was born in Jersey City in 1942, and died in New York in 1988 at the…
TIFF Review: Margarethe von Trotta’s ‘Searching for Ingmar Bergman’
Searching for Ingmar Bergman opens with acclaimed German director Margarethe von Trotta in Gotland, on the rocky beach from several…
Carol Morley’s ‘Out of Blue’: Refractions of “The Female Investigative Gaze”
Following the TIFF world premiere of Carol Morley’s fourth feature-length film, Out of Blue (2018), the director, seated adjacent to…
In praise of teenage self-disgust: ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’
The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but in The Miseducation of Cameron Post, it is those…
Why ‘Lady Macbeth’ is the Intersectional Feminist Film You Didn’t Know You Needed
We’re often a little too happy to classify as ‘feminist’ anything that presents lead female characters confronting gendered oppression, but…
“My View Not Their View”: The Rewriting of Andrea Dunbar’s Story
In May of last year, I attended the 30th anniversary screening of Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987)…
Suddenly, a Woman Spectator: An Interview with Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey (b. 1941) is best known for the groundbreaking essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1973, published 1975) in…
Suffering and the Limits of Criticism: Jenny Lu’s ‘The Receptionist’
When Jenny Lu graduated from London’s Chelsea College of Art in 2009, she left with the same bright-eyed optimism typical…
We Need to Talk About Violence in Lynne Ramsay’s ‘You Were Never Really Here’
In You Were Never Really Here (2017) – Lynne Ramsay’s first feature film since 2011 – Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is…
From Object to Subject? Léonor Serraille’s ‘Jeune Femme’ and Agnès Varda’s ‘Vagabond’
The ‘free’ woman walking the city has become something of a popular myth, particularly in recent works of biblio-memoir, or…
Filming too Close: Naomi Kawase and the Caring Filmic Gesture
1 – We both like the same things. We’re parent and child. Are you filming again? Give it a rest!…
Madonna, Whore, ‘Alanis’
In the poster for Anahì Berneri’s Alanis (2017), the eponymous female protagonist (played by Sofia Gala) sits on a chair…
“I wanted to make a film that makes you feel like you’re in the middle of the storm”: An interview with ‘Shakedown’ director Leilah Weinraub
People warned me that my first Berlinale would be surreal, but nobody prepared me for the experience of sitting down…
From out of the Margins: BAM’s ‘A Different Picture: Women Filmmakers in the New Hollywood Era’ Series
Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978) feels at once strikingly fresh and familiar, which is perhaps the secret of its enduring popularity…
‘Ocean’s 8’, Anna Delvey, and our love for the woman who wants to own the world
Debbie Ocean has been in prison for five years, eight months, and 12 days. Her brother Danny is dead. Probably….
Men will never save you: On Coralie Fargeat’s ‘Revenge’
At the start of Coralie Fargeat’s debut film Revenge, Jen, the protagonist, could be an image plucked from a…
Crazy In Love: Transgressive Femininities in Anna Biller’s ‘The Love Witch’
Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016) opens with the image of a solitary vintage car driving down an isolated California…
On Valeska Grisebach’s ‘Western’ and its borderlessness
Valeska Grisebach describes her latest feature, Western (2017), as a “dance with the genre”.¹ Here the cinematic evocations of the…
From Star To Director: A Look at Kinuyo Tanaka’s Directorial Debut
Among Western fans of Japanese cinema, Kinuyo Tanaka is easily recognisable as one of the great actors of the mid-20th…