Baroque Pleasures and Queer Transformations in Evangelia Kranioti’s ‘Obscuro Barroco’
Obscuro Barroco (2018) is shot through with the baroque. Textures of fabric and flesh, caught in movement, guide the essay…
Reviews
A Drama of Access: On Sebastián Lelio’s ‘A Fantastic Woman’
At the recent Academy Awards A Fantastic Woman pulled off the historic double feat of claiming both the first-ever Oscar…
BERLINALE – A remedy against the solitude of war: On Lola Arias’s ‘Theatre of War’ (‘Teatro de guerra’)
Malvinas una representación inconclusa (Malvinas: An Inconclusive Representation), an essay written by Lara Segade for the Argentine film magazine Kilómetro…
Berlinale – Yoko Yamanaka’s ‘Amiko’
I’ve never been sure what lemons are supposed to symbolise and the internet is no help. Are they meant to…
Berlinale – Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß’s ‘My Happy Family’
A 52-year-old woman decides to move out of her family home and take an apartment alone. She has no apparent…
BERLINALE – Bojina Panayotova’s ‘I See Red People’ (Je Vois Rouge)
Early on in I See Red People, Bojina Panayotova, the director and protagonist of the documentary, calls her mother, Mirena,…
BERLINALE – Marysia Nikitiuk’s ‘When the Trees Fall’ (‘Koly Padayut Dereva’)
Ukrainian first-time feature director Marysa Nikitiuk’s When the Trees Fall is a fairytale of gasping, screaming excess, where narrative is…
BERLINALE – The Debt of a Mother’s Love: On Yang Mingming’s ‘Girls Always Happy’
To be a woman is to be in a world that understands you as other; the mere act of being…
Of River Gods and Women: Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘The Shape of Water’
In 1960, a state-of-the-art beachfront laboratory nestled in the Caribbean island of St Thomas began training dolphins to understand the…
On Andrey Zvyagintsev’s ‘Loveless’ and the casual cruelty of modern love
If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, the women of Loveless make clear how, for scorned women, the…
Power, performance and personhood: On ‘Phantom Thread’
Contains spoilers: In 1950s London, spoiled fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis) lives a privileged, glamorous life. Coddled by…
A Hard, Uncomfortable and Poetic Film About the Survival of People: On ‘Mudbound’
In his novel, Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner writes: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Born…
Between the Ingénue and the Heroine: on Sandrine Bonnaire’s ‘Marianne Faithfull: Fleur d’Âme’
Sandrine Bonnaire possesses a face which, in its planar, geometric architecture, seems designed to be in front of the camera,…
Little More Than A Temper Tantrum: On Ruben Östlund’s ‘The Square
The Square opens on an interview between art curator Christian (Claes Bang) and journalist Anne (Elisabeth Moss). She starts gently…
A Shamefully Cack-Handed Depiction of Violence Against Women and Ethnic Minorities: On ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’
TW: Rape, racial violence, police brutality In Martin McDonagh’s 2012 film Seven Psychopaths, “Marty”, a screenwriter and a thinly veiled…
Beauty is truth: on Alain Gomis’s ‘Félicité’
Félicité is a singer at a local bar in Kinshasa, the busy and vibrant capital of the Democratic Republic of…
The Extraordinary and the Ordinary: Teresa Griffiths’s ‘Leonora Carrington: The Lost Surrealist’
Leonora Carrington’s best known story features a bored debutante who persuades a hyena to replace her at a ball. Disguised…
The Discomfort of Recognition: Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s ‘Erase and Forget’ (2017)
“How do we see each other, rather than mak[e] someone other?” With this question, filmmaker Andrea Luka Zimmerman gestures toward…
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…