When teacher Antoinette Lapouge (Laure Calamy) takes the stage with her class of 8-year-olds to sing what can only be described as a completely inappropriate love song to a parent assembly dressed in a low-cut silver lamé gown, it’s clear she’s a bit of an emotional fruit loop. Her students sing the verse, but she …
With Antonia’s Line, writer/director Marleen Gorris created a film that is both a celebration of life and an unflinching look at the challenges intergenerational women faced throughout the 20th century. The feminist filmmaker achieved for world cinema what many great female directors before her could not. 1994’s Antonia’s Line represents the first foreign-language film by a female filmmaker …
Matt Tannenbaum is all about stories. He loves telling them and living them, and for over 40 years, he has loved selling them through his beloved local institution, The Bookstore, in Lenox Massachusetts. Hello Bookstore pays homage to him and to his store. As far as recent economics are concerned, his is a common tale. …
At the end of his experimental film Lux Aeterna, writer/director and provocateur Gaspar Noé plasters the line “Thank God I’m an atheist” onto the screen. As an auteur, cinema should be Noé’s chosen deity, although whether he did it dirty or created a worthy offering to that god with his movie is a matter of opinion. …
When Isaac Mizrahi called Mrs. Kasha Davis a ‘workhorse queen’ on RuPaul’s Drag Race, those of us who know and love drag beyond RPDR knew what he meant. There is a whole country full of drag artists, from sea to sequin-sparkling, shining sea, that work without the benefit of national and international television. They hone their …
Happily, Warner Brothers and the filmmakers behind Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore have openly flouted ‘Don’t Say Gay’ absurdities with the third installment of the Fantastic Beasts franchise. Right out of the gate, Dumbledore (Jude Law) and Gridelwald (Mads Mikkelsen) talk about the love and devotion they once had for each other. No one is hit over the …
Perhaps you’ve heard about Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust-era graphic novel Maus, which has gotten a lot of press lately for being banned in Tennessee. That press probably made it even more famous and widely read. It’s a gorgeous, culturally valuable book, and it should be celebrated. So too, should Leben? Oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?), an …
Whenever filmmaking team of Betsy West and Julie Cohen are slated to release a new documentary, I get excited. They have a way of being sensitive and hard-hitting in equal measure. What is most striking about their new documentary Gabby Giffords: Won’t Back Down is how, for most of the duration of the film, viewers will likely …
Anyone who thinks women have equality can look to continued the lawsuits and struggles for acceptance for equal pay in the sports world. It can be really depressing. Those who need a jolt of positivity can watch the new documentary Skate Dreams, the first film ever made about the rise of women’s skateboarding. It features profiles …
Australian writer/directors Hanna Barlow and Kane Senes bring mean girls, social media savagery, fear of being cancelled, the repercussions of childhood trauma, and gore, gore, gore to their comedy horror mashup Sissy. Aisha Dee is both luminescent and looney tunes as the title character Sissy, or as she has calls herself to her 200,000 IG followers, …
