Ren Jender

In the film “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” set in 18th-century France, a glance, a stare is everything. The artist Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is commissioned to paint the noblewoman Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) so that the man Héloïse’s mother has arranged for her to marry can approve or disapprove of her before the wedding. Héloïse — opposed to the impending nuptials — has refused to sit for portraits before, and at first Marianne must do her job surreptitiously, studying her subject carefully ...

While queer characters and writer-directors are no longer rare in mainstream films and TV, I’ve found myself drawn back to queer film festivals this year to see the parts of the community that aren’t included in the latest hit show from Netflix or That Film Everyone Went To That Is a (Largely Unacknowledged) Metaphor for Transition. Queer film festivals also attract and appreciate queer audiences, something a lot of media companies and publicists have no idea how to do, even with the rare TV ...

REVIEW: The Sundance standout documentary is as intimate as it is revolutionary

In the early 2000s, Kristen Lovell, co-director (with Zackary Drucker) of the extraordinary Sundance documentary The Stroll was one of many trans sex workers, most of them Black or Latine, who stood in the streets at night in the New York City’s old Meatpacking District, waiting for a passing car—and potential client—to stop. She was the subject of a documentary back then (a younger, chubby-cheeked Lovell is shown...

Authorship matters, especially at Sundance, which started last Thursday and runs through January 29th (including virtually: you can buy a ticket to watch from home most of the films shown at the festival in person.) Sundance is one of the only big-name festivals that has gender parity in who directs its films, as well as a complex system of diversity initiatives, artist labs, and other resources to make sure the films they program aren’t directed by a white, straight, cis male majority. This ...

Lauren John Joseph’s At Certain Points We Touch has all the hallmarks of a novel I almost certainly won’t like: It’s about an aimless main character who hangs out with unreliable, irresponsible friends, does drugs with them and is involved with a man who, most of the time, seems repellent. But I loved At Certain Points We Touch, as do the acclaimed, queer writers Jeremy Atherton Lin and Olivia Laing. Joseph was named by The Observer as one of the best debut novelists of 2022. At Certain Point...

If someone had told me one of my favorite films from Sundance would be about a thrash metal band in Lebanon, I wouldn’t have believed them. But Rita Baghdadi’s Sirens—executive produced in part by Maya Rudolph and Natasha Lyonne—is one of the rare documentaries that plays like a really good narrative film. It would make a great double bill with Alex and Sylvia Sichel’s All Over Me, a 25-year-old movie about young women in the riot grrrl scene. Like that film, Sirens traces the fraught friends...

Nothing Compares, Kathryn Ferguson’s stunning documentary on the rapid rise and fall from worldwide fame of Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor, comes at an auspicious time. We’re living in a moment where women singers who were previously vilified by mainstream media—like Britney Spears and Janet Jackson—have been redeemed by taking a closer look, often in documentary form, at what really happened.

O’Connor (who changed her name to Shuhada’ Sadaqa in 2018 after converting to Islam, but still uses he...

Curator and historian Hugh Ryan’s first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, is what a queer history should be but rarely is: fun, entertaining and gossipy while still accurate and informative. It also includes a wide enough array of queers (some famous, many not) that it feels like a portrait of a community, and not just a corner of it.

The title subject of Ryan’s newest LGBTQ+ history, The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, published this month by Bold Type Books, ...

A question that women—not all women, but probably more than men might guess—sometimes ask themselves is, “If I could kill the men who have harmed me and not suffer any consequences, would I?” This question has likely been on women’s minds more in the years both during and after the Trump administration. So writer-director Karen Cinorre’s debut feature film, Mayday (which opened in theaters and started streaming on October 1), feels timely.

The main character, Ana (Grace Van Patten, who played...

The author of “Heretic: A Memoir” talks about why fantasy and mystical things appeal to queer people

Enough memoirs by queer ex-Christians (either evangelicals or Mormons) have been published in recent years that these books could have their own section at Hudson News. Jeanna Kadlec’s Heretic: A Memoir, out this fall, stands out, not because she went on to found an LGBTQ2S+-inclusive lingerie boutique or distributes a newsletter about “Astrology for Writers,” or even because indie musician Lu...

REVIEW: While uneven in its execution, Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham’s reboot justifies its own existence

I was an adult when I saw Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own, the much-loved fictionalized account of the Rockford Peaches, an Illinois team that was part of the women’s pro baseball league in the 1940s and ’50s. I watched the film with a group of other queer women in 1992, shortly after it opened in theatres. We were arty, not sporty, dykes: we wouldn’t have watched, let alone played...

The anachronism of being “first lady” is in the name itself: in 2022, hardly anyone under the age of 85 who is not a member of the British aristocracy (speaking of anachronisms) unironically refers to themselves as “lady”. If democracy survives in the US (not a given!) someday the president will have a spouse who isn’t a woman and the amended title “first gentleman” or even “first man” or “first person” exposes the ridiculousness inherent in the limiting “first lady” title. The job descriptio...

On a recent episode of the podcast Appodlachia, author Neema Avashia admits that her new book—the evocative and thought-provoking collection of essays, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place—is a direct response to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (which she takes pains not to name) to counteract that memoir’s stereotypes and right-wing agenda. Morgan Jerkins, author of Wandering in Strange Lands, says Another Appalachia (out March 1 from West Virginia University Press...

Ditching pop stardom made of outrageous meat dresses and monsters, Lady Gaga has evolved from diva/singer to actress. After winning an Oscar for A Star Is Born in 2018, and Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci doing relatively well at the box office, despite the continuing pandemic, Lady Gaga has become a movie star, one who can attract an audience under almost any circumstances. (People certainly didn’t flock to the theaters because of director Scott: His previous film, The Last Duel (2021), was a ...

One of the frustrating things about growing older is seeing the history you lived through get distorted. The inaccuracies range from the trivial (“No one in the ’80s wore their hair like that”) to serious errors (one of the exact parallels between the COVID-19 pandemic and the AIDS crisis is that the number of deaths were undercounted. The actual death toll was higher). Queer and AIDS activism in the early ’90s were a whirlwind even for those of us who were there (maybe especially for us!), s...