Who will wear a crown? On Angela Schanelec’s ‘Music’
In the beginning, there is fog and there is thunder. The Gods are enraged. It is a struggle to see…
Reviews
Rebecca Liu on ‘Barbie’
The idea that femininity is a performance that alienates the subject from herself has gained even greater ground in the…
Helen Charman on ‘The Eternal Daughter’
At first, Joanna Hogg’s latest film The Eternal Daughter follows the conventions of a ghost story. On a winter’s night…
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…
Nathalie Olah on Aftersun
A man sits slumped on the edge of the bed, turned away from the camera, his broad back curved and…
Georgie Carr on Ruben Östlund’s ‘Triangle of Sadness’
Ruben Östlund describes himself as a socialist, and on the surface his films exhibit a flair for zeitgeisty political engagement,…
Laura Staab on Ann Oren’s ‘Piaffe’ (2022)
Everything in Piaffe is attractive, including the title: a single word with French etymology and an ineffably elegant double ‘f’,…
Laura Staab on Lucile Hadžihalilović’s ‘Earwig’
I thought I might try to pen an Oulipian essay on Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Earwig, in which a girl (despite nearing…
On Audrey Diwan’s ‘Happening’ (‘L’événement’)
Hearing about a new film adaptation of an Annie Ernaux book always makes me nervous. Her texts are so committed…
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,…
Georgie Carr on Pablo Larraín’s ‘Spencer’
When Diana was killed in a car crash in August 1997, my dad drove our family to the beach in Eastbourne….
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…
Pass This On: Prano Bailey-Bond’s ‘Censor’ (2021)
The lingering profundities of horror are rarely to be found in a film’s straightforward symbolism but instead in the figurative…
On Emma Seligman’s ‘Shiva Baby’
Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby is a confused and hectic debut that follows a young woman, Danielle (Rachel Sennott), who is…
“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…
Jessa Crispin on Dasha Nekrasova’s ‘The Scary of Sixty-First’ (2021)
From the first moments of The Scary of Sixty-First, I was thinking about Sofia Coppola. Not the films she directed,…
Passion Imperfect: On Danielle Arbid’s Simple Passion
Midway through Simple Passion (2020) the protagonist, Hélène, played with studied poise by Laetitia Dosch, announces to her lover, “I…
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…
An Unwavering Self-Regard: Sofia Coppola’s ‘On The Rocks’ (2020)
“That’s the way I work: I try to imagine what I would like to see,” said Sofia Coppola in an…
Seeing, and Seeing Through, Art History: The Resurrection of Hilma af Klint in ‘Beyond the Visible’ (Halina Dyrschka, 2019)
Sometime last year, I tweeted: “are Hilma af Klint selfies the new [Yayoi Kusama] infinity mirror selfies?” Selfies taken in…
Charlie Kaufman’s ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ begs for forgiveness yet again
What might Charlie Kaufman have left to say about himself after writing about himself and his screenwriter ego personified as…