Film
Onlookers Records the Lure of the Tourist Gaze
Kimi Takesue’s new documentary nudges us to consider whether we in the audience differ all that much from the tourists whipping out their iPhones.
Eileen G’Sell
Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic whose work focuses on gender, sexuality, and economic class. She is a 2023 winner of the Rabkin Foundation Prize in arts journalism and teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Film
Pandora’s Box Unleashes a Universe of Male Oppression
Newly restored, G.W. Pabst’s 1929 film provides a bleak, unsettling account of a showgirl’s ruin at the greedy hands of competing male suitors.
Film
Sundance Documentaries Pay Tribute to Female Trailblazers
This year’s Sundance Film Festival offered an array of documentaries spanning cultural vantages and historic eras, about women who span the globe.
Film
In Four Daughters, Women’s Narratives Prevail
Kaouther Ben Hania’s feature film blurs the distance between the personal and cultural, individual and systemic.
Film
Anselm’s Sweeping Vision Obscures the Political
What does it mean for a film addressing overtly political themes to remain apolitical?
Film
The Silencing of Female Sexuality Champion Shere Hite
Director Nicole Newnham chronicles the rise, fall, and disappearance of the iconic feminist sexologist.
Film
The Commodification of American Motherhood
How to Have an American Baby exposes a Chinese business that cares only for the bottom line, and a private US hospital system more than happy to serve patients paying cash.
Film
New Doc Updates Virginia Woolf’s Gender-Bending Orlando
Paul B. Preciado’s film prizes creative passion over pathology, and trades individual trauma for collective and individual transcendence.
Art
Crowning the Queens of Hip-Hop Culture
Women artists’ contributions shine in The Culture, an exhibition about hip hop at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Film
The Trailblazing Black Model Who Changed the Fashion Industry
To say that Bethann Hardison has contributed to racial progress in one of the world’s most whitewashed realms is an understatement. But a new documentary about her life might have gone a step too far.
Film
Kokomo City’s Bawdy, Unflinching Feminist Message
D. Scott’s documentary on Black trans sex workers is as sunny as it is sobering, a film that refuses to moralize.
Film
Maybe Some Artists Don't Make It For a Reason
Make Me Famous, a new documentary about East Village artist Edward Brezinski, does little to prove that its subject should have risen to the top.