Balancing verité grit with sometimes-howling humor, Matteo Garrone’s new movie is subtler than what viewers might anticipate.
Eileen G'Sell
Eileen G'Sell is a regular contributor to Salon, VICE, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. In 2019 she was nominated for the Rabkin prize in arts journalism. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Posted inFilm
The Origins of the Colombian Drug Trade Told Through an Indigenous Family’s Eyes
The female-forward characters and the matrilineal Wayúu tribe the movie orbits have gone surprisingly under-explored by film critics.
Posted inArt
Virginia Lee Montgomery’s Abject Whimsy
Virginia Lee Montgomery toys with the psychic space in which abjection is gendered, playfully prodding erotic hierarchies.
Posted inArt
Kehinde Wiley’s Painted Elegies for Ferguson
The subjects of Wiley’s Ferguson paintings launch a vibrant dialogue between the canvas of the painting and the canvas of the body.
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Two Feminist Directors Who Exposed the Trials of Working Class Women
While the female protagonists in Barbara Loden’s Wanda and Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens may be lost — and legitimately poor — the one thing they are not is self-pitying.
Posted inArt
Mona Hatoum’s Psychological Surgery
While artist’s career has consistently invited interpretation based in institutional critique and real-world tumult, it is equally constructive to consider her work from a psychological, rather than political, vantage.
Posted inArt
An Afro-Surrealist Project Deifies God-Like Bodies of Color
Damon Davis plumbs the depths of Black history, fantasy, and mythology to create a vision of power and resilience in his St. Louis exhibition.
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Agnès Varda’s Utopian Musical Homage to Feminism from the 1970s
One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, Varda’s precious and poignant feminist musical from 1977 has been restored.
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Bruce LaBruce Misfires with an Awkward Marriage of Punk and Camp
The provocative auteur’s latest, The Misandrists, attempts a tongue-in-cheek critique of radical feminism.
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Juliette Binoche Beds and Sheds Lovers in Claire Denis’s Anti-Rom-Com
Let the Sunshine In is a rom-com only insofar as our heroine, a successful painter and divorcee, drinks and sleeps with a lot of men and frets about it later; but the laughs are few and the sighs are heavy.
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Visions of Joan of Arc as a Dancing, Singing, Head-Banging Kid
French director Bruno Dumont’s latest, a ponderous experimental musical about Joan of Arc’s childhood, celebrates the innocence and banality of a young saint’s life.
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Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg Spar in a Haunting Love Triangle
French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin’s latest, Ismael’s Ghosts, offers a nuanced look at how women in mid-life grapple with fear and loneliness.