Jezebel
Promising Young Woman Needs More Murder
While it’s satisfying to see a rapist and murderer finally be held responsible for his actions, Cassie’s death is a particularly vicious ending for a character who, all considered, was always one step short of materially harming anyone. At no point does Cassie do more than merely terrify people into confronting the depth of their wrongdoing. While her death felt like the correct and inevitable ending, the film never quite manages to lay the necessary groundwork to make it feel emotionally justified. It’s like long division—they needed to show their work.
Yes, God, Yes Wants to End Sexual Shame
Dyer plays Alice with the right tonal balance of teenage curiosity and childlike naiveté. When the ill-fated rumor reaches her, she’s equal parts shocked and intrigued. She doesn’t know what it means to “toss someone’s salad” but she does know exactly where in Titanic the sex scene happens, and she watched it three times in a row. It doesn’t matter what she actually knows, though—in the space of one afternoon, her reputation has been recast, and the school’s Kirkos retreat is the only thing that might set it right.
Memes Are Robbing Breonna Taylor of Her Story
But the definition of what that justice should look like has shifted significantly in a manner of weeks. Activists have succeeded in making police abolition a mainstream political consideration, meaning that calling for the arrest of the officers in Taylor’s case is now a message that is out of step with the current demands for police and prison abolition. As a result, people invested in Taylor’s case are divided into two factions: those who want to pursue traditional means of justice and those who want to use her case as an example of how to enact alternative, more progressive means of redress that can be modeled for the future.
Consent Is Multi-Layered in Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You
Coel’s portrayal of Arabella imbues her with a desperate sort of wandering—Bella at once knows who she is and who she is not. She simply cannot figure out how to exist as both selves at once. But her hurt, panic, and mania reverberate through her life. Terry’s guilt at not being there for her friend manifests as aggressive mothering, and Kwame’s desire to support her means he never raises his own assault and keeps quiet when Arabella puts him in a situation that deeply triggers him. All three of them are hurting in various ways, and Coel is generous enough to allow Arabella to also exist along the continuum of harm. As she is wrapped up in her own trauma and healing, she tramples over the trauma and healing of her friends.
Insecure's Season 4 Excelled at the Language of Broken Friendships
As Molly and Issa leveled up in different parts of their lives, they in turn refused to see the growth of the other, compounding the uneasiness that had been building between them. Whether it was Issa telling Molly she was doing too much for wanting to get serious with Andrew or Molly calling Issa messy for not abandoning her budding friendship with Condola, they couldn’t allow each other to step outside the roles they had been assigned within their relationship. It meant that misunderstandings became fights, and fights became fall-outs.
In BlackAF, Kenya Barris Only Has Love for White People
Barris unintentionally reveals that his real struggle is that he only values the opinions of white audiences and critics. Approval from his own community is meaningless if it isn’t couched in white validation. It explains why his television shows are all about “blackness” instead of about black people. In his mind, there is an essential way to exist as a black person descended from American slavery, and his television shows have all been about teasing out the limits of those boundaries.
Swallow Considers the Tragedy of the Trophy Wife
With so little of her life truly left up to her, swallowing things allows Hunter a small measure of control in its purest, most distilled form—bodily autonomy. For as long as her pica is a secret, it is almost a competition she is having with herself, daring her body to accept and then safely reject objects that remain foreign to it. Even as Richie and his parents close ranks in an attempt to restrict her behavior, finding ways to swallow things against their wishes is a manageable act of rebellion.
Feminism Means Survival on Good Girls
In a concrete sense, these women are just poor. They’re a few of the millions of Americans for whom money would solve all their problems. But they don’t have any and can’t get any, so they simply take some. Theft is obviously a crime, but can anyone be blamed for not wanting their child to die from a treatable disease or be put out onto the street? Empowerment here—that nebulous, near meaningless pop feminist term—means a willingness to break the law and justify it on moral grounds for the sake of survival.
Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey Is a Fun, Demented Carnival Ride
Truthfully, the movie’s plot is the least interesting thing about it. The story exists and it’s coherent, but ultimately it’s window dressing on the demented carnival that is these women’s fateful meeting. The granular details are far less interesting than the film’s aesthetics and characterizations. With such a stacked cast (I haven’t even gotten to Ali Wong, Ewan McGregor, and blonde, murderous and very queer Chris Messina), it’s a near miracle that writer and director Christina Hodson and Cathy Yan were able to create such realized characters.
Zola Is A Triumph In More Ways Than One
But Zola is a triumph in more ways than one. From the writing and directing to the costuming and production design, Bravo and her team transform the famed series of tweets into an of-the-moment film that captures the same frenetic energy of the story that enraptured the internet nearly five years ago. If you were lucky enough to follow the tale when it unfolded online all those years ago, you’ll find that Zola translates the fervor and excitement of that night into an enjoyable film without once sacrificing the sarcasm or wit that was so apparent even then.
Resistance Is Futile In The Assistant
It’s clear over the course of the story that Jane is desperately looking to find a way to avoid resigning herself to complicity without making herself and her career a casualty. But she never does discover how. There is no indication that she has been changed in any way by the day’s proceedings. She doesn’t quit, she doesn’t cry—we see no outward indication of frustration. In fact, the overwhelming impression is that instead, she accepts her boss’ behavior as inevitable, letting the company’s culture swallow her whole in order to save herself.
Queen & Slim’s Beautiful Betrayal
At its heart, Queen & Slim is a road movie. But it’s also a beautifully rendered story about a love that blooms in hardship—in direct defiance of the forces that threaten it. Queen and Slim grow to know and love each other over the course of their deadly, six-day first date. The trauma they endure together binds them, yes, but they begin first as testy and reluctant co-conspirators, then friends, then lovers. Their interrupted story is but one of many that are cleaved apart by state violence every day—their violent end is the only possible response from a nation that always saw them as illegitimate citizens, to begin with. Their demise is fated, not earned.
The Poor Eat The Rich But Not Each Other In Parasite
The conflict between the two parties leads to a final, unbelievable climax that is as fitting as it is unpredictable. But the central message remains the same: class warfare also necessitates class solidarity. In Snowpiercer—Joon Ho’s first English feature—the metaphor is also clear: the most treacherous enemies aren’t just wealthy, but the poor who betray each other to uplift the rich. It’s an idea that keeps cropping up as a secondary thesis in stories about the friction between the wealthy and the poor.
Beanie Feldstein Finds the Sweet Spot of Nerdy Teen Girlhood
The best part of Feldstein’s performance is that Johanna feels extremely lived-in as a teen. Despite spending most of her time around grown men who keep her around out of amusement, she is still smart, engaging and sincere. She is entirely self-possessed and brings her whole heart to every interaction, challenging their cynical dismissal of the things that other people love. But as a teen, Johanna is desperate to be liked, so her sharp turn to invective masking as critique happens easily when her colleagues demand it. The way to build a girl isn’t by breaking her down, but by allowing her to find different paths to building herself in the best way she knows how.
Hustlers Makes Class War Fun
Hustlers is about what women do to survive, the networks they create to look out for each other, and the lengths they will go to to protect each other. These women face real problems and take real risks, but in the end, it’s as Ramona says: America is a strip club. Some people are tossing money around and some people are doing the dance.
Vita and Virginia Belabors Queer Romance
The sad fact is that Vita and Virginia simply isn’t very good, and never quite lives up to the extraordinary promise of these two literary titans. It flattens Vita into a fussy, privileged, womanizer who entertains herself by having affairs and almost entirely glosses over the magnitude of Virginia’s mental illness and suicidal ideation. Arterton, Debicki, and their real-life counterparts are underserved by a script that doesn’t quite understand its own relationship to queer romance and has little to say about it except that it existed.
Euphoria's Season 1 Was Equal Parts Fantasy and Condemnation
The beating heart of the show is the relationship between Rue and Jules, and the way Rue uses Jules as her anchor to a life without addiction. She is the one real thing Rue can tether herself to, and the jealousy and insecurity she displays as Jules builds relationships with other lovers over the course of the season. The queerness of their love is presented as a simple fact. They make no bones about how the nature of their relationship changes over time. Instead, it is the men who are fixated on heterosexuality who find themselves violently consumed by their inability to adhere to the binary.
Luce Upends the Common Narrative of White Liberal Guilt
Luce plays on expectations of race, respectability, and white liberal guilt to weave a taut, terrifying tale that dares the audience to speak its suspicions aloud. Musical strains ramp up the tension, then disappear as quickly as Luce switches expressions. This isn’t a situation where the audience is waiting for the characters to catch up to what we already know. Here, instead, we’re at the edge of our seats, constantly switching allegiances between Harriet and Luce, trying to discern motives that remain opaque. There are no easy answers. In fact, there are no answers at all. The drama is intensely compelling, invoking trite assumptions about established racial hierarchies to trick the audience into acknowledging their own biases.
'Aggressively Fine': An Evaluation of The Lion King Performances
The biggest, most glaring problem with the film is that it’s difficult to build an emotional story arc around a set of animal characters that are deliberately not anthropomorphized. Real lions do not smile, or sing or otherwise express human emotions. But if millennials are to be believed, the original 1994 version of The Lion King was so impactful precisely because of its high emotional stakes.
There Is No Redemption for Serena Joy in Season 3 of The Handmaid's Tale
Serena Joy is not simply a woman longing for a child. She is a Wife and war criminal who helped create the architecture of Gilead, actively advocated for the restriction of women’s rights and participated in the ritual rape of enslaved Handmaids. She directly contributed to the oppression of tens of thousands of women and still benefits from the limited privileges she made sure to allow for a woman of her station. Serena did not begin to question her devotion to Gilead until after she found herself caught in the crosshairs of its cruelty. There is no path for her redemption.
When They See Us: The Truth Is Hard To Watch
When They See Us is terrifying to watch. There’s an inevitability that seeps into every frame, not because we know the ending, but because the suffering feels so unavoidable. Of course a stable of white officers rounded up every black teen they could find regardless of their right to do so. Of course they substituted one for another when their case started to fall apart. Of course they interrogated the boys for hours without their parents. Of course they went along as the prosecutor led the evidence instead of letting it lead her. Of course the boys were naive enough to take the officers at their word. Of course a jury convicted despite a lack of forensic evidence and a litany of conflicting testimony. Of course, of course, of course…
The Perfection Turns the Rape Revenge Fantasy Into Spectacle
The movie pretends for as long as it can that its central conflict isn’t about rape, which ironically only serves to increase the ambient threat of sexual violence and make the inevitable reveal feel gratuitous and unnecessary. The attempts at misdirection do not work; the eventual confirmation feels less like a reveal and more like punishment. Smartly, The Perfection never depicts a rape, but it finds lots of time to substitute other, more traditional kinds of violence instead. The film starts off as a fun, relatively predictable horror film, then rapidly devolves into the grotesque as the narrative shifts and bends with its many twists.
The Promise of a Black Future Is Compromised in See You Yesterday
It’s hard not to be resentful of the very mechanics of the film. White teens get three rounds of fairly low-stakes hijinks with the classic Back to the Future trilogy that all have happy endings. […] Black youth do not get access to levity and hijinks. They do not get entertaining (if slightly incestuous) forays into their own pasts. Black teens get localized tragedies as big as any world-ending event; there are no terminators or loops to close, but death stalks them nonetheless.
Fast Color Places Family Heroics Over Superhero Powers
In those final moments, Ruth’s power symbolizes the ways in which the very world we live in turns on the labour of black women; we have the power to shift the axis of the world. Ruth and Lila’s renewed quest for an ancestral homeland for women like them speaks to much larger ideas about the lengths black women must go to protect themselves and ensure their safety. An ancestral homeland where they can be hidden from the world and in the company of those who don’t seek to exploit them is a tantalizing ray of home in a world that is crumbling around and constantly in pursuit of them.
Beyoncé’s Homecoming Makes The Past Present
Homecoming can be seen as the culmination of Beyoncé’s years-long exercise in constructing her own legacy. […] She constantly pulls from her own oeuvre and reimagines it in innovative and exciting ways, folding it in on itself and compounding how we are instructed to see her work. With each new musical outing, she invents a new frame through which to view her output, demonstrating the long arms of her creative imagination. Her music has always had the ability to be molded and reconfigured in this way; shaped to match the myriad visions she has for the ways she wishes to present herself to the world. Beychella was the culmination of this vision, a seismic flexing of her creative dexterity.
Obsessed Set the Blueprint for Enjoyably Mediocre Black Thrillers
Terrible as it was, Obsessed set the stage for the black thrillers that have continued to pop up in regular intervals since the movie’s 2009 release. The plots of these films tend to be paper thin after-thoughts that place black (heterosexual) couples in opposition to an outside antagonist, usually with a focus on the interiority of the black woman and the struggles she faces, up to and including the inciting incident. Whether it’s Gabrielle Union fending off home invaders in 2018’s Breaking In or Sharon Leal being stalked by the lover she took during the throes of her sex addiction in 2014’s Addicted,this hyper-specific genre is chock full of scenarios that put black women in the role of both the damsel in distress and the righteous wronged heroine, often allowing them to save themselves.
Broad City Is Over But Its Friendship Is Forever
In the end, Broad City was radical in the way it repeatedly asserted that the primary, most beautiful, intimate, and meaningful romance of your life can be the relationship you have with your best friend; its closing shots were a nod to the fact that the city they love is full to the brim with such friendships, blooming and growing everyday, and deepening in their significance as they endure. Abbi and Ilana were a perfect encapsulation of a very specific millennial experience, and the show will stand as a monument to the intensity and devotion that women can have for one another when they stop squirming under men’s gaze and reject its existence altogether.
Shrill Expands Television's Treatment of Fatphobia and Body Image
Shrill is undeniably a show about navigating the world while fat, but it’s also about self-esteem, loneliness, friendship, and righteous anger. The first episode features a devastatingly accurate read of the emotional calculus many fat people perform to justify the ways in which they diminish themselves; finding elaborate ways to try to be “enough” and finally deserve affection. But it also features a guilt-free abortion that ends not with the patient feeling sad or regretful, but proud and powerful that she was finally able to take control of her life. That, too, is a radical moment of television in an increasingly conservative political landscape.
Captain Marvel Pulls Off Charm But Carries the Baggage of the MCU Universe
Captain Marvel’s biggest issue is that it is narratively hobbled by appearing so late in the MCU’s canon. Instead of being able to function as a relatively standalone introductory film like the franchise’s other origin stories, its primary purpose is to act as a bridge to Avengers: Endgame. As with last summer’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, shifting the stakes after the end of Infinity War is a difficult task. It’s harder to care about lost mothers or lost memories when the literal fate of the universe hangs in the balance.
Lady Gaga’s “Bad” Pop Song From A Star Is Born Actually Rules
The problem is not with “Why Did You Do That?” but with the fact that A Star Is Born is largely framed through the eyes of Jackson, played by Bradley Cooper. His resentment of Ally’s rising success as his own star declines colors the way he perceives her music, and by extension, the way the film frames the music’s quality. The movie thinks “Why Did You Do That?” is a bad song because Jackson thinks it’s a bad record, and the movie is by and large a reflection of his experiences of their relationship.
Widows Is the Rare Heist Film That Explores Women's Sacrifice
Betrayal is intrinsic to Widows: In order to right their husbands’ wrongs, they must accept that they were intentionally left in the dark by the men they loved. When men err in these narratives, women feel justified in wrestling back control of their lives, even in ways that are unambiguously criminal. In Widows, these women’s actions are driven not just by the need to get even, but by their need to survive.
Creed II Lacks the Spark to Rewrite Rocky History Again
The film doesn’t seem to realize that Viktor is this film’s Creed—an upstart underdog saddled with a legacy he never asked for and fighting like hell prove to himself worthy of a name he didn’t choose. Both men are actors in a decades-long stage play, and their much-touted fight is the rising action of a final act for which they’ve both written different endings. Both are simply doing as the rigid rules of masculinity require: defeating their foes through violence. The problem is that none of this is ever fully articulated at any point during the film.
Green Book Is Another Film About Race for White People
Despite its frustrating politics, Green Book is the type of film tailor-made to court awards consideration from an Academy that had to be shamed into diversifying its ranks. With its insistence on the pretense of loving our way into racial harmony, the movie exists almost exclusively to allow white moviegoers to nod sagely about “how far we’ve come” before calling the cops on their black neighbors for not waving hello.
Well-Read Black Girl's Glory Edim On Her Book Club and the Importance of Representation
“The responsibility of a writer representing an oppressed people is to make revolution irresistible,” said Toni Cade Bambara in 1976. It’s a sentiment that women working in the black feminist literary tradition understand intimately, making it a fitting guiding ethos for Glory Edim’s second annual Well-Read Black Girl Fest.
Taylor Swift Can’t Save You
In a way, this would seem like the Occam’s razor—an event of such political significance occurred that Swift finally felt a moral obligation to break her public silence. But even if we accept this as true, it only brings more questions to mind, primarily: Why did it take the public flagellation of a white woman to get her to shift her stance? Was it simply the first time she’d seen her privilege challenged in such a definitive way?
Assassination Nation and the Cathartic Power of Female Rage
The witch hunt has historically been about decimating the women who refuse to conform; who fail to perfect the delicate balancing act between “sexually available” and “slut,” “chaste” and “prude.” But men have co-opted even that, claiming the term to describe any call for long overdue consequences of their wanton disregard for female personhood in all its forms. So why shouldn’t we just take up arms, raze it all down and reclaim the world as our own?
Natalie Portman Embodies Pop Spectacle in Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux
With Vox Lux, Corbet speaks to how pop music is far more about the spectacle than the music, but he also examines how unnecessary intellectual rigor or technical skill is to the process. The modern pop star’s job is not to tell us how to feel, but to provide us with a template upon which to project our feelings. They bring the melodic frame and we bring the emotional heft. It is a symbiotic relationship of sorts: we pay them to reflect ourselves back to us.
Where Hands Touch Can't Make a Nazi Love Story Work
While expertly made, the film fails because it refuses to meaningfully acknowledge the basic truth of the terrifying power dynamics between the two lovers. […] Where Hands Touch focuses so much on the idea that love can traverse any boundary that it forgets there’s no love strong enough to bridge a genocide.