This year brought filmgoers three top-notch biographical films on troubled women pop stars: Amy, Janis: Little Girl Blue; and What Happened, Miss Simone? Amy Winehouse and Janis Joplin took too many drugs and flamed out early. Nina Simone, though, soldiered against high odds on into old age, battling the twin tormentors of mental illness and […]
Onstage, Janis Joplin wailed the blues, drank whiskey, and drove the crowds wild. Offstage, she drank whiskey, slept around, and died shooting smack in 1971. But Joplin believed in music, worshipped it, seized its power to communicate and transport. Her love of music was the purest thing in her life, and Janis: Little Girl Blue […]
Imagine you have a young friend from conservative rural Turkey. Funny that, because her modishly off-kilter beauty looks more like what you’d see in a Paris modeling studio. Your friend is flirty and flighty, but she conceals something that you’d never mess with: stone courage and a will of fine metal. Does she tell fibs? […]
Three Asian films at the DOC NYC festival reveal spaces we rarely see and people we are unlikely to meet, even in a globalized, connected world. These outwardly calm works contain unpredictable emotions, immense risks, and power games sometimes unseen, sometimes thrust into the open.
“We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” […]
Her father died on the Titanic. She bought art directly from Picasso, Giacometti, Brancusi, and de Kooning, and drank with them, too. Her failed sexual encounter with Jackson Pollock ended when he “threw his drawers out the window.” And she lived out her last years in a magnificent palazzo in Venice, leaving behind a socko […]
As I took my seat to watch Brooklyn at the New York Film Festival, the middle-aged man to my left flashed me a dirty look. Clearly the gentleman did not want company next to him, and so he made sure to throw me the kind of pitch-black shade that lets you know you’ve invaded […]
The Italian countryside is no place for a teenage girl, at least not in Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders. Young Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu) lives with her parents and three younger sisters in a run-down farmhouse. Her German father, Wolfgang, insists they live off the grid, confining the family in joyless, hardscrabble bohemianism. Workdays on the […]
It’s the same every damn time, isn’t it? Reports of a mass shooting roll in on the TV. Ashen-face police chiefs announce a death toll. Victims and survivors weep. Arguments flare about guns. And then it happens again. And again. How will the circle be unbroken?
The documentary The Armor of Light shows how two very […]
Women voting, no big deal, right? But it is. For centuries, British women not only lacked the vote but enjoyed no rights within the home. Requests for justice were met with immovable male condescension until the requests escalated into demands and women activists embarked on a Weather Underground-style insurgency. Contrary to their prim image today, […]
