Tag
Hollywood
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Hijabs On the Small Screen Only, Please!
Why is hijabi representation divided between small-screen success and big-screen blunders?
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The Rhapsodes of Cinema
A. O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism—released in January of this year, to some fanfare—is a handbook for living by a kind of generalized critical “ideal,” one which combines openness to experience, capacity for discrimination, and respect for humane values and artistic standards. This kind of airy critical sensibility is unobjectionable in and of itself.…
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Making Labor Visible: An Interview with Ramiro Gomez
The work of Ramiro Gomez draws attention to the domestic workers and day laborers upon whose ministrations luxury lifestyles depend …
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Jeffrey Combs’s Re-Animator
The first scene of the Stuart Gordon’s 1985 cult classic Re-Animator shows us our lead, our anti-hero protagonist, in a state of panic. In the halls of the stately University of Zurich, Herbert West has experimented on his mentor, who is now a screaming, pulsating aberration, a physical monstrosity. West, played by stage actor Jeffrey…
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On Our Nightstands: Movies Edition
Last week, in anticipation of the Oscars, we published a special “Women and Movies” issue of Public Books. Now that the statuettes have been handed out and the glitter has settled, we look back on our favorite movies of the past year, ranging from underdogs to popular favorites. The envelope, please … SHARON MARCUS Editor in Chief Ryan…
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A Brief History of Women Accepting Oscars
From the comfort of the couch, the Academy Awards hold a perverse attraction. What will fall flat more often: the dreadful jokes, or the award recipients as they clamor up the stairs to claim their prize? How far will the host go in biting the hand that feeds? How bright the teeth, how lofty the…
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Close to the Bone: An Interview with Filmmaker Debra Granik
Debra Granik is the director and co-writer of Winter’s Bone, which was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Her latest film, the documentary Stray Dog, follows the everyday life of a Vietnam veteran. A. O. Scott called it an “implicit challenge to the lazy habit of looking at American life…
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Can Child Soldiers Be Saved?
Everybody loves stories about child soldiers, it seems, as long as redemption is involved. A memoir about Sierra Leone’s civil war, for example, is not exactly the feel-good stuff you’d expect to see at a Starbucks counter. But in 2007 Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, one of the first…
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The Stranger’s Voice
The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s riveting debut novel, is a chronicle of war wrapped in a spy thriller and tucked inside a confession. It is also a political satire, a send-up of Hollywood, and a scathing critique of mid-20th-century Orientalism. Nguyen juggles genres like so many flying AK-47s, and to dazzling, often hilarious effect. At…
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The Art of Extraction: An Interview with Jean-Claude Carrière
Acclaimed French screenwriter and novelist Jean-Claude Carrière has had a career spanning more than 50 years and 90 writing credits, including the adapted screenplay for 1979’s The Tin Drum, which won both the Palme d’Or and Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for that year, and many films directed by Luis Buñuel. One of…
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Forgotten Woman
When we think of the ’30s film musical, we tend to picture Fred and Ginger gliding through the polished worlds of Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), and Shall We Dance (1937). Earlier in the decade, however, Warner Brothers produced a spate of song and dance films that were less willing to deny Depression…
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Rotten Love
In the mid-1940s Fritz Lang made two films in quick succession, both starring the same trio of actors: Edward G. Robinson, Dan Duryea, and Joan Bennett. The first of these works has the more notable pedigree; The Woman in the Window (1944) was among the crop of Hollywood exports to France that would, along with…
