Section
Film
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Migrant City: Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light”
“I have lived here for twenty-three years, but I am afraid to call it home. There is always a feeling that I will have to leave.”
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Speaking the Monster: Ecofeminism in “Alien” and “Aliens”
“The Alien movies model how patriarchal culture distracts people from capitalism’s parasitism by designating women as the real threat.”
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In Free Fall: Watching “Joyland”
“Joyland” joins a resurgence of Urdu films in recent years whose social realist orientation it both shares and disavows.
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“If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It”: Ander Monson on “Predator” and the Monster of American Masculinity
“I see actual male friendship, in a way that I don’t in almost any other action movie from the 80s.”
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Guy Horror: “Rosemary’s Baby” and Coercive Control
Fifty-five years after its release, “Rosemary’s Baby” is still a masterful depiction of abuse we are only now beginning to officially recognize as “coercive control.”
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Listening to #MeToo
“Speaking out” is what began the #MeToo movement. But fulfilling its goals will require listening.
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What Films Should We Teach?: A conversation about the Canon
What are the most-assigned films in college classrooms? Three film studies professors talk about the rankings and what they mean.
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More Than Hearts and Minds?
Armageddon Time is undercut by the very forces it hopes to expose: white complicity, forged through the exploitation of Black life.
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Can You Feel It? “Happening” and Sensory Cinema
A new film centers on a young, unmarried woman’s attempts to secure an abortion—over a decade before France legalized the practice in 1973.
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Would that the Earth Could Stop Us
“Ecohorror” films depict nature avenging itself on humans, revealing a common but wrong-headed hope: that nature can win, even if we do nothing.
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Femme Fatale Talks Back: Meenu Gaur on Feminist Filmmaking
“We have to take over spaces because we are not going to be invited in.”
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Goodbye “West Side Story”
Many Latinxs—the nation’s largest ethnic group & most avid movie consumers—think the nation’s most beloved musical on racial tolerance is racist.
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Watching “Go Fish” with My Queer 15-Year-Old
“You can wear something to be cool,” you told me, “or because another person likes it. You don’t have to be truly ‘yourself,’ or whatever.”
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Toxic Masculinity, Spectral Homosexuality
The secret of the Western—as Jane Campion’s “Power of the Dog” shows—is that its mythology nurtures a queer fantasy, hiding in plain sight.
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“Mississippi Masala” @30: Revisiting a Film Classic in Authoritarian Times
What might it mean to forge a politics explicitly based in the places we are, rather than a politics of the places from which we came?
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Miguel de Unamuno in Spain’s Memory Battle
As fascist armies conquered much of Spain, a writer publicly and famously denounced high-ranking officers right to their faces. Or did he?
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When the Vibe Is Off
Which matters more, intent or interpretation? What if a juxtaposition of images in literature or art is just that—a chance encounter?
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“Nomadland” Swerves from the Manly Road Movie
Repeatedly, the film shows this venturesome woman alone at all hours—yet never do we see her fearing or fending off assault.
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To Air Is Human
An aerodynamicist and an anthropologist discuss the world of “Dune,” finding it as aesthetically beautiful as it is functionally implausible.
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Selling Violence
Some Mexican filmmakers now mirror global stereotypes about Mexico’s violence, which make the films legible for international liberal audiences.
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“Reality Entails Risks That Fiction Doesn’t Know”: Talking with Everardo González
“There is definitely a line between victims and perpetrators. But that line is not essentially determined.”[none-for-homepage]
