A WRINKLE IN FILM
Both Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time are portal fantasies–-specifically, dealing in the fantasy that there is another world, a more just world, just beyond our reality. In Black…
So Mayer
A City Frozen in Time
To understand what has been revealed about Hollywood over the last few months--no, the last few years, going back to the leaked Sony emails that presaged the endemic discrimination that…
Where Are You?
Waru (2017) means eight in Māori: it’s a film made up of eight chapters, made by eight directors (all Māori women, ranging from the incredibly experienced Briar Grace-Smith to debut…
Leaving the Party
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign memoir is currently the 5th bestselling title on Amazon US. Its title, What Happened?, could also be given to Sally Potter’s thrilling new film The…
Towards Faces
In her new film Visages, Villages (2017), co-directed with artist JR, Agnès Varda speaks on the voice-over of going “vers de visages,” towards faces. The documentary travels with Varda and…
Light, Writing
It’s a cliché to say that cinematography means ‘writing with light’ – and equally a cliché to say that one of the things cinema struggles with most is showing writers…
Deaths, Men and… Sales
Spoiler alert: Details from the plot of the Oscar-winning film The Salesman by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi are revealed below. It’s been twenty years since Buffy the Vampire Slayer first…
Back to their Roots
Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time It Gets Dark (Dao Khanong) is not an easy film to describe – but then, it’s not an easy film to watch, starting as it…
Don’t Hardly Know Them
It’s been a year and I’m still ear-wormed by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ 1981 cover of Crimson and Clover that plays "over and over" in Jennifer Reeder’s dreamy and…
No Sister Flower
Twenty-five years ago, my school friends and I became obsessed with a poem: “Love’s Philosophy,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Or rather with its second stanza, as sent to the young…
At Sea
Black rhinos are critically endangered; middle-class straight white men are not – and yet, here they are on a yacht, in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s third film Chevalier, acting like they’re…
Spending the Night With Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Last month I spent the night with filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It wasn’t just me: more than a hundred people gathered on the brand-new plush purple seats of Tate Modern’s Starr…