‘Ocean’s 8’, Anna Delvey, and our love for the woman who wants to own the world
Debbie Ocean has been in prison for five years, eight months, and 12 days. Her brother Danny is dead. Probably….
Narrative
Men will never save you: On Coralie Fargeat’s ‘Revenge’
At the start of Coralie Fargeat’s debut film Revenge, Jen, the protagonist, could be an image plucked from a…
Crazy In Love: Transgressive Femininities in Anna Biller’s ‘The Love Witch’
Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016) opens with the image of a solitary vintage car driving down an isolated California…
On Valeska Grisebach’s ‘Western’ and its borderlessness
Valeska Grisebach describes her latest feature, Western (2017), as a “dance with the genre”.¹ Here the cinematic evocations of the…
From Star To Director: A Look at Kinuyo Tanaka’s Directorial Debut
Among Western fans of Japanese cinema, Kinuyo Tanaka is easily recognisable as one of the great actors of the mid-20th…
Lean on Pete, the anti-Odyssean epic
Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete takes the Yorkshire-born filmmaker to the luxuriant plains of America’s Pacific Northwest, where a fifteen-year-old…
Jaume’s World: The Patriarchal Imaginary of Jaime Rosales’s ‘Petra’
Note: Review contains a few of many spoilable plot points. Petra, the sixth feature from Spanish arthouse director Jaime Rosales,…
“Learn to love your claustrophobia”: Jason Reitman’s ‘Tully’
Watching either of the two trailers for Tully, the third collaboration between Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman, you’d be forgiven…
Cannes Review: Agnieszka Smoczynska’s ‘Fugue’ (‘Fuga’)
There’s a scene in Agnieszka Smoczynska’s second feature film, Fugue, where the husband of amnesiac protagonist, Alicja (screenwriter Gabriela Muskała),…
Cannes Review: Alice Rohrwacher’s ‘Happy as Lazzaro’ (‘Lazzaro Felice’)
The idea for Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzaro Felice) reportedly came to Alice Rohrwacher when remembering an article she had read…
Cannes Review: Jafar Panahi’s ‘Three Faces’ (‘Se Rokh’)
Jafar Panahi’s Three Faces begins with a suicide video that may or not be real. A well-known actress, Behnaz Jafari…
Care at the Margins: Debra Granik’s ‘Leave No Trace’ (2018)
What does it mean to retreat, to withdraw, to leave the village for the forest? Is it a rejection of…
Cannes – Zsófia Szilágyi’s ‘Egy nap’ (‘One Day’)
Zsófia Szilágyi’s debut film One Day (Egy nap) is a study in the purgatory of motherhood and is riddled with…
mother! in the name of The Father
“The stories of both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene teeter constantly,” warns Donna Haraway, “on the brink of becoming much…
Radical Banality: On Chantal Akerman, Labour in Cinema, and the Legacy of May ‘68
“The most boring, monotonous films [sic] any director ever made. In this film, they just show the woman doing her…
“But it’s not real”: Rape as Metaphor in Sergei Loznitsa’s ‘A Gentle Creature’
“The only thing worse than rape,” filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa wrote in the press notes for his 2017 film A Gentle…
Speaking at Cross Purposes in Claire Denis’s ‘Let the Sunshine In’ (2017)
“So it is a lover who speaks and who says:” So begins Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, a philosophical…
The Provincialism of the White Hipster: On Wes Anderson’s ‘Isle of Dogs’
Isle of Dogs presents, without a hint of irony, an American filmmaker’s fiction about the horrors of an internment camp…
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…
In Praise of Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘Things to Come’
Does the future look something like the sea? The opening scene of Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come (its French title…
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…