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, […]
Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie places her mother in the center, but the film’s real star is death. It hangs ever present over the movie, making itself felt more acutely in the sad light of the filmmaker’s recent presumed suicide, days before she was scheduled to present this film at the New York Film Festival. […]
If you’ve seen one movie about teenagers, have you seen ’em all? The rituals of youth flouting authority, wallowing in angst, and struggling to appease frustrated sex drives can all start to look the same after a while, but directors can’t stay away from them. Michel Gondry is one auteur with a fixation on adolescence, […]
If you take the word sweet, whisk away the S and move a few letters around, you end up with twee. Asia Argento’s Misunderstood veers between the two states while chronicling the travails of a preteen girl and her eccentric family in 1980s Rome. Along the way the film flirts with peril and incendiary themes, […]
She’s your best friend. Your cruelest enemy. Sexier than you. Cooler. No one makes you feel as alive as she does. And no one knows better how to make you feel so small. She stole your boyfriend. Turned your girlfriends against you. But you’ll do anything to be around her. You love her. You […]
