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…
Narrative
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…
How Do You Solve a Problem like Duszejko?: On Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’ and Agnieszka Holland’s ‘Spoor’
For Janina Duszejko, the Polish protagonist of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Prowadź swój…
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…
Oubliette
Instructions for reading: Play the song ‘Art Decade’ by David Bowie on repeat while reading this text. Read the text…
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…
Broad Horizons and Shallow Vistas in Chloé Zhao’s ‘Nomadland’ —TIFF 2020
As I write this, the reviews for Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, which premiered earlier this week at the Toronto International Film…
Despite its Name, Maya Da-Rin’s ‘A Febre’ (‘The Fever’) Wards Off Pathologising
In Maya Da-Rin’s first narrative feature film, A Febre (The Fever), Justino sits with his grandson Josué in the kitchen…
Pretty Little Cults
“I see what you mean about the pageantry,” remarks Dani (Florence Pugh) in Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) as she scrolls…
Towards a Quilombo Cinema: An Afro-Brazilian Feminist Roundtable
A conversation between Everlane Moraes, Janaína Oliveira, Kênia Freitas, and Tatiana Carvalho Costa. Translated by Lillian Maguire and Natalia Davies….
The Luxury of Savouring in Kelly Reichardt’s ‘First Cow’
One of the pleasures of Kelly Reichardt’s narrative films is that their plots (where they exist) never feel artificial: the…
A Language of Traces: The short films of Mati Diop
“My characters rarely find themselves where they want to be in the world: there is always somewhere to escape from,…
As a Woman in America, Always: Eliza Hittman’s ‘Never Rarely Sometimes Always’
Autumn, the 17-year-old protagonist of Eliza Hittman’s sophomore film Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020), first stands out because of her…
‘Olivia’ by Olivia
Midway through Olivia, headmistress Mlle Julie (Edwige Feuillère), going to bed, notices light under the door of one of her…
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…
“Not my country, not my home, nobody in the whole world”: The Life and Cinema of Lorenza Mazzetti (1928 – 2020)
When she arrived at the British border off the ferry from France in 1951, Lorenza Mazzetti’s Italian passport was stamped…
‘Little Women’, Little Change
If the radical potential of adaptation lies in its ability to harness the energy of an established text for new…
Women on the Edge: History, Temporality, Sisterhood and Political Militancy in Marge Piercy’s ‘Vida’ and Margarethe von Trotta’s ‘Die bleierne Zeit’
(Crawling titles rise from bottom of frame, white-on-black:) In May, 1972, bombs exploded […] In all, thirty-six people were injured…
A Woman Escaped? The Female Automaton in Robert Bresson’s ‘Mouchette’
The first android was a woman. In Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s novel L’Ève Future (1886), a fictionalised Thomas Edison attempts…
Crisis-women: Prostitution and Capitalist Modernity in Lina Wertmüller’s ‘Love and Anarchy’
“That pig must die!” declares Salomè, with tears in her eyes. The pig? Mussolini. Salomè? An anarchist prostitute embroiled in…