Of Marceline Loridan-Ivens
In 2003 I saw a film that absolutely knocked me out with its incomparable visual beauty, its exploration of traumatic…
Narrative
Super-ego, super-charged: Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Suspiria’
While Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017) received general acclaim last year, one particular critique cut through the…
“I have always wanted it”: Sebastián Lelio’s ‘Disobedience’
Disobedience, Sebastian Lelio’s adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel of the same name, follows the story of Ronit, a lapsed Orthodox…
Learning to Care: Adina Pintilie’s ‘Touch Me Not’
To be intimate and vulnerable with another involves being honest with oneself, or so the saying goes. This task is…
The Act of Taking: Lee Chang-dong’s ‘Burning’
If a sign is a premonition, it points to a future; if it’s a clue, a past. But sometimes a…
Bare life, corrupt elites and surviving in today’s America: On Steve McQueen’s ‘Widows’
While the United States Senate was debating the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh in Washington DC, the trial of a century…
Navigating the liquid cinema of Argentina’s ‘Las Calles’ by María Aparicio and ‘El Futuro Perfecto’ by Nele Wohlatz
When film critic Roger Alan Koza asked María Aparicio, a young filmmaker from Córdoba, Argentina, about the experience of shooting…
On ‘Crazy Rich Asians’, crazy rich Asia, and capitalism in the time of postcolonial love
A truth universally acknowledged in East Asia is that a wealthy married woman with ample free time is in want…
Have you Earned this Parody? On ‘Assassination Nation’
Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or if there even…
Naomi Kawase’s ‘Vision’: Poetic Worlds and Vegetal Camerawork
Naomi Kawase’s Vision takes place in a rural zone of the Nara Prefecture. This is the region in Japan where…
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…
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…
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…
Madonna, Whore, ‘Alanis’
In the poster for Anahì Berneri’s Alanis (2017), the eponymous female protagonist (played by Sofia Gala) sits on a chair…
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…