Movies

Making the Grand Romantic Gesture

In our seven years together, we’ve thrived on routine. We’ve done long-distance before, but never quite like this.

Who Deserves Love In the Nineties Rom-Com?

Somewhere between the one-dimensional BIPOC sidekick and the final, showstopping kiss, I forgot that I was consuming love stories built on exclusion.

Feb 13, 2023
Lessons In Lust and Life from ‘Dirty Dancing’

Like Baby, I was raised to be a nice Jewish girl, with all of that trope’s stifling implications.

Nov 02, 2022
The New Haunted House Is a Symbol of the Housing Crisis

Beneath the veneer of desire and ambition lurks something darker—the grotesqueness of wealth and the violence it implies.

Oct 26, 2022
Save the World, Abort the Future: ‘Terminator’ and Trans Bodies After Roe v. Wade

When I think about queer masculine pregnancy and parenting, I think about Sarah Connor in ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day.’

Oct 18, 2022
Nuns, Nurses, and Busybodies: The Queerness of the Character Actress

This is what I became known for in acting class: old-lady drag.

Oct 11, 2022
Looking into the Reflections of Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Mirror’

The filmmaker’s retreat from the conventions of Socialist realism—patriotism, militarism, subservience—becomes a journey to locate the self outside the strictures of state ideology.

Sep 01, 2022
Horror Films Understand the Terror of Pregnancy

We are told we will forget the pain, as though all the trauma of childbirth evaporates from our minds. But it did not for me.

Aug 08, 2022
A Woman Walks Home Alone At Night

In a horror film, the sight of a woman alone fills us with dread. We expect terrible things to happen to her. But she also fills us with a sense of supernatural expectation.

Jun 01, 2022
Hayao Miyazaki’s Characters Help Me Grieve My Chronic Illness

“Howl’s Moving Castle” and “The Legend of Korra” are about protagonists living with magic and fighting for the fate of the world. To me, they’re also metaphors for dynamic disability.

Dev Patel in ‘The Green Knight’ Helped Me Manage My OCD

Many times I could have said the same as Gawain, terrified in the face what was to come, “I’m not ready. I’m not ready yet.”

Nov 23, 2021
Prison Visitation Isn’t Like the Movies

When my dad was incarcerated, I began noticing specific tropes that reinforce a cultural narrative about prison all around me.

Aug 11, 2021
The Real Villain in ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ is Toxic Work Culture

Fifteen years after it premiered, ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ continues to teach ambitious young people that exploitation is the price you must pay for success.

The Minari of My Memory

That plant in a park in Rhode Island delivered the promise that there might be something familiar in this place where everything was new.

May 06, 2021
Detangling the Myth of Colorblindness in ‘Cinderella’

What is lost in a story that chooses to make Brandy a princess and Whitney Houston a fairy godmother despite their Blackness, not because of it?

Mar 31, 2021
Attack of the Six-Foot Woman

Hannah Walhout on body horror, ‘Attack of the 50 Foot Woman,’ and the growing pains of being the tall girl.

Feb 11, 2021
What ‘Poetic Justice’ Can Teach Us About Black Art Beyond Trauma

Can Black writing be seen as more than a product of our death and pain?

Dec 17, 2020
Sex, Lies, and Vampires: Rethinking ‘Twilight’ and Purity Rings

Without anywhere to talk about sex or process it, ‘Twilight’ offered an alternative space to unravel my own private desire.

Nov 12, 2020
‘The Mighty Ducks’ Movies Taught Me How to Survive a Pandemic

I’ve found an unavoidable kinship with the Ducks. It could be, at least in my estimation, a quintessentially black American story.

May 19, 2020
On Horror Movies and What It Means to Rewrite the Dead Girl

She is the page on which the story is written. Her body is a crime scene, and the victim of the crime, and the perpetrator of a crime, all at once.