Rebecca Liu on ‘Barbie’
The idea that femininity is a performance that alienates the subject from herself has gained even greater ground in the…
Rebecca Liu on Maria Schrader’s She Said
Journalism is concerned with documents, events and facts, not psychoanalysis. There are phenomena that it describes but does not strive…
Rebecca Liu on Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Lost Daughter’
I have become used to films about Mediterranean summers filled with sweeping wide shots of golden beaches, sand and greenery,…
Rebecca Liu on Jane Campion’s ‘The Power of the Dog’
Ten minutes into Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, an aloof ranch owner sits at the end of a…
“Yes, girls, we love your corpses”: Emerald Fennell’s ‘Promising Young Woman’
Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman opens to the dreamy electronic notes of Charli XCX’s ‘Boys’, the London singer’s 2017 light-hearted…
Layers of Reality: Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s ‘The Cloud in her Room’
“Dreamlike”, “transitory”, “driftily disjointed” – reviewers have used these terms fittingly to describe Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s debut feature, The Cloud…
Cao Fei’s ‘Blueprints’ finds freedom in fantasy
Cao Fei’s ‘Blueprints’ begins in a room decorated to look like a mid-20th century foyer in China: the kind you…
Mr Zuckerberg, Tear Down My Wall
A common narrative about social media goes like this: something something anxiety and deep insecurity; it’s hard to see an…
A Hellish Commons: Bong Joon-ho’s ‘Parasite’
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) is an upstairs-downstairs tale of contemporary class inequalities, as a poor and a rich family become…
Elizabeth Banks’s ‘Charlie’s Angels’ and the death of early millennial camp
When I heard that Sony was going to be rebooting Charlie’s Angels in 2015, my heart – to cite Ariana…
Who gets to be ‘the people’? Astra Taylor’s ‘What Is Democracy?’ and Gabrielle Brady’s ‘Island of the Hungry Ghosts’
An impromptu interview on a beach in Miami. A casually dressed white woman in her thirties is perched comfortably on…
Lorene Scafaria’s ‘Hustlers’ and the Anatomy of the Scam
Recently our headlines have been dominated by young female scammers: scammers whose exploits are spoken of with breathless fascination. Their…
A Magnificent Filial Debt: Love and Family in Lulu Wang’s ‘The Farewell’
It’s difficult for me to process The Farewell, a film so acute in its approximation of the shape of my…
Finding freedom in Sturla Pilskog and Sidse Torstholm Larsen’s ‘Winter’s Yearning’ —Open City Docs
It would have been too precious for Winter’s Yearning to have been titled Waiting for Alcoa, yet Beckett’s existential drama…
The Making of a Millennial Woman
Being a millennial feels like being stuck in a permanent state of on-the-cusp adolescence. Sulky, prickly, and painfully hyper-visible, our…
Aude Léa Rapin’s ‘Les héros ne meurent jamais’ (‘Heroes don’t die’) takes on the ethics of the documentary film – Cannes
Aude Léa Rapin’s Les héros ne meurent jamais (Heroes don’t die) begins with Joachim (Jonathan Couzinié), a thin, bearded young…
Rebecca Zlotowski’s ‘Une fille facile’ (‘An Easy Girl’) takes on the cliché of the woman of leisure – Cannes
Rebecca Zlotowski’s Une fille facile (An Easy Girl) opens with a contradiction. A quotation from 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise…
Monia Chokri’s ‘La femme de mon frère’ (‘A Brother’s Love’) ventures beyond the hellscape of the self – Cannes
La femme de mon frère opens to a combative discussion between four philosophy professors about whether they should pass a…
De-fetishising the Commodity: Xiaolu Guo’s ‘Five Men and a Caravaggio’
Five Men and a Caravaggio is true to its title: a story of five men, each from different artistic professions,…
On Necessary and Unnecessary Love in Karyn Kusama’s ‘Destroyer’
Small talk is boring. We hate it, and it’s obvious why – it’s a begrudgingly necessary preamble to any purposeful conversational exchange,…
Screening Female Desire: Bette Gordon’s ‘Variety’ 35 Years On
‘Once in a fiction workshop my professor critiqued a scene because “women wouldn’t ask about a hookup’s performance in bed”…