Festivals & Awards · Women in Film
Rather than a fascist leader, in Vox Lux Celeste suggests a different sort of monstrosity – a receptacle for the nation’s horrors and fantasies, even more than a Madonna or a[…]
Comedy · Directors · Women in Film
American Audiences watched Irma la Douce without discomfort, perhaps because French prostitutes and pimps were performing immoral acts and misdeeds. The same subversion of middle-class values that would later inform[…]
Drama · SF & Fantasy · Women in Film
Even as it has sunk like a stone commercially, Annihilation has drawn a flurry of passionate responses, mainly, it seems, from women writers. Many single out its admixture of beauty[…]
Designers · Drama · Women in Film
This is the second of two pieces on Phantom Thread. See Sam Ankenbauer’s different take in the previous post. * * * The articulation of female pleasure in The Phantom[…]
The internal structure of Lady Bird is, I think, unconsciously designed to evoke the monster mother and then deflect the daughterly hostility she provokes by turning things around to insist,[…]
Historical & Epic · Horror · Women in Film
The Witch is about what is in woman that is presumed not to exist, because it cannot be seen. * * * Robert Altman’s 3 Women is mostly a high-kitsch[…]
Drama · Memoir · Religion & Spirituality · Women in Film
Both protagonists undertake a kind of “work of the self,” whereby they simultaneously come to terms with trauma – in one case, paternal betrayal, in the other, maternal abandonment by[…]
Comics · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy · Women in Film
Unshackled by the Snyder malaise – and ignoring the slow motion he made a fad with 300, which Jenkins curiously revisits with consistency verging on the fetishistic – Gadot roars.[…]
The women in these feminist films have power, but they’re more complex than fatale. * * * In the ultra-buoyant realms of badass, the femme fatale is equal to any[…]
