At one point in BARBIE, Greta Gerwig’s pink-plastic jab at the patriarchy, America Ferrara, as Gloria, an ordinary woman, gives an impassioned précis on exactly what women face in the current social climate. It is a clarion call that should reverberate through the ages and one that will, like the film in which it appears,… Read More »
RETURN TO SEOUL — Davy Chou Interview
Click here to listen to the interview. Davy Chou based his film, RETURN TO SEOUL, on the real-life experiences of his friend, Korean-born Laure Badulfe. She was adopted as an infant by a French couple and, as an adult, returned to the land of her birth in order to meet her birth parents. Chou used… Read More »
NANNY — Nikyatu Jusu and Anna Diop Interview
Click here to listen to the interview. Led by a stunning performance by Anna Diop in the title role of Aisha, an undocumented immigrant working to bring her young son over from Senegal, NANNY is a powerful yet subtle film that uses horror as a way of addressing so much more, in this case, the… Read More »
WOMEN TALKING
WOMEN TALKING is a compassionate, reasoned film about a very ugly subject that tells its compelling story within strict confinements. The action takes place among an Amish-like sect in 2010 as its women take on issues of the patriarchy with a fiercely clear eye and the safe remove of an almost metaphorical setting. Within this… Read More »
DON’T WORRY DARLING
DON’T WORRY DARLING is not the most coherent of feminist manifestos, but it is an ambitious one, exploring as it does several variants of toxic masculinity, some unexpected, but no less pernicious for the surprise factor. Using a devoted couple, Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack (Harry Styles) as the focal point of gender dynamics, the… Read More »
NOTHING COMPARES
It is high time for a re-appraisal of Sinéad O’Connor. Now best remembered with a tinge of distaste for tearing up a picture of the Pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992, the singer is the focus of Kathryn Ferguson’s documentary, NOTHING COMPARES. Centering on O’Connor’s precipitous rise to stardom at barely 21 to the… Read More »
MEDUSA
Anita Rocha da Silveira’s MEDUSA is a savage satire of self-enforced female repression. Set in an unnamed country that could be the filmmaker’s native Brazil, or any country with a vocal and fervent minority currently vying to bring Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale to life, it is a lushly metaphorical take on the kind of right-wing… Read More »
HAPPENING — Audrey Diwan and Anamaria Vartolomei Interview
When I spoke with director/co-writer Audrey Diwan and star Anamaria Vartolomei about THE HAPPENING (L’événement ) via Zoom on April 23, 2022, the infamous Supreme Court leak about The Brethren’s intentions about Roe V. Wade hadn’t yet happened. Still a film about a single woman seeking an illegal abortion in 1963 France still had great… Read More »
I BLAME SOCIETY
I’m not giving anything away to tell you the punch line in Gillian Wallace Horvat’s I BLAME SOCIETY. It’s a perfectly timed, and even more perfectly delivered explanation about the film her character made in the course of this vicious, and viciously funny satire: I’m sorry it didn’t meet your expectations, I didn’t make it… Read More »
ANTEBELLUM
Of the many neat twists in ANTEBELLUM, the most disturbing of all is the one that concerns the state of race relations in the modern day, and how slavery still informs it. By contrasting the subtle, and not so subtle, micro-aggressions forced upon people of color in the present with the brutality of slavery as… Read More »