Last week’s historic grand jury report about sex abuse in the Catholic church removed any remaining possible doubt that the church has institutionalized the oppression and disenfranchisement of women and children. But this isn’t a recent development; Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc shows in horrifying…

Whenever a particularly notorious horror movie comes out, I end up fielding a lot of questions about it, some from people who think they might see it but aren’t sure, and some from people who know they won’t see it but still want to know as much about it as…

What two very different films can teach us about becoming both an artist and a woman — My boyfriend and I watched the 2007 film Once last night, both of us for the first time, and I’m a little embarrassed to report that neither of us really liked it. The songs, which are the centerpiece of the film and which mostly hold up, don’t have the same…

Hollywood has always been cool with teen sexuality — as long as it’s male teen sexuality — Olivia Milch’s 2018 comedy-drama Dude (appropriately released on Netflix on 4/20) covers ground that will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Superbad, Revenge of the Nerds, or Porky’s: a group of friends want to maximize their fun before the end of high school and hopefully get laid in the process…

Cynthia Nixon’s nuanced and hilarious portrayal shows us another side of the familiar poet — Terence Davies’ 2016 film A Quiet Passion is not the paint-by-numbers artist biopic you might expect. Like Emily Dickinson herself, it defies classification: it’s a comedy, a tragedy, a family drama, and an artist’s journey. Davies employs a lot of the familiar visual touchstones we associate with Dickinson: the high-collared…

Jocelyn Moorhouse’s 1991 drama Proof is a bit of a prickly pear. It stars Hugo Weaving as a blind photographer — yes, you read that right — who’s trying to expand his social circle while getting out from under the thumb of his obsessive housekeeper, Celia (Geneviève Picot). His new…

Revisiting a Proto-Feminist Classic — It’s hard to overstate Ida Lupino’s importance to film history. During the 1950s, when she directed four of her eight films, she was the only female director in the entire Hollywood studio system. Not the best known or the most popular female director in Hollywood, but THE ONLY ONE. To…

Turns out 2018 is already a pretty great year for movies — I know it’s only March, but a lot has happened! The Oscars came and went. I’ve seen two of my most anticipated movies of the year and have maybe given up on a third (more on that later). And I’m chipping away at my moviewatching goals for 2018, though not…