Film
Beyond Utopia is a grim reminder that, against growing odds, people keep leaving North Korea, or try to. It may be a while before another family agrees to film the journey out.
My second crop of Sundance screenings features three films that are all about women who, on some level, retreat from certain aspects of their lives: their pasts, their trauma, their public persona.
Kim’s Video is quixotic in a nutty way — in an old Indie style — that is more refreshing than it is nostalgic.
In Infinity Pool, people who are dead inside essentially play with their own corpses as shiny, new toys. The savagery of that idea is, simply, delicious.
The three films I selected to start my 2023 Sundance journey were very different from one another, but they shared one common theme: girlhood.
These films provide a glimpse into the workings of a culture and society increasingly cut off from the rest of the world as well as a taste of a cinema that had once been among the world’s greatest and which may one day be again.
Alice, Darling is a potent reminder to women that they should trust their instincts — and rely on their friends.
Reviews of the cogent and well-crafted The Big Payback, the comprehensive if conventional Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space, and No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics, which expertly balances whimsy and gravity, though the version of the film shown by PBS has been heavily censored.
Sarah Polley’s essay on sexual assault by itself is worth the price of the book, essential reading for anyone interested in the physical and psychological after-effects of violence against women.
Flipping a Coin: The Significance of Anna May Wong’s Quarter
What emerges from even a cursory study of Anna May Wong’s life is that her complexity and depth were rarely acknowledged but she used her intelligence to control the narrative as much as she could.
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