Ren Jender

Tereza Cervenova/Courtesy of Hulu
email
Print Article
AA
A queer woman acquaintance on Twitter once called The L Word, the most well-known TV series by and about queer women, "the worst show ever made." And not one of her thousands of followers — on a platform known for the argumentative nature of its denizens — disagreed with her. When The L Word first aired, every queer woman I knew was watching. What choice did we have? We couldn't just switch to some better show by and about queer women b...

Survivors of the Crisis
Filmmaker Carla Simón takes viewers back to Summer 1993
by Ren Jender
“Why aren’t you crying,” another child asks Frida (Laia Artigas), the six-year-old main character of director Carla Simón’s debut, Summer 1993 (which Simón co-wrote). Frida’s mother has died and inside her Barcelona apartment Frida’s relatives pack her things so she can move to rural Catalonia with her aunt, uncle, and younger cousin, Anna. But outside on the street, under nighttime fireworks, she pl...

The Public Image Is Rotten, Tabbert Fiiller's documentary about Public Image Ltd. (PiL), the band John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) formed after the Sex Pistols, makes one wonder: Does anyone still care? Its interviews are either with aging, fanboy musicians (including Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea, who nearly joined PiL in the ’80s) or with the revolving door of instrumentalists who were in PiL through the decades.

Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood follows Scotty Bowers, a World War II veteran (now 95) who, after he was discharged, became a sex worker and pimp. Cary Grant, Walter Pidgeon, Randolph Scott, and Tom Ewell were among the famous clients Scotty calls “tricks” in the same charmingly anachronistic way he calls everyone “baby.”

For every contemporary-spirited Hamilton, Broadway stages numerous revivals of musicals from half-centuries ago, few of which have books, lyrics, or music by women or people of color. Even those productions with relatively diverse casting are unlikely to involve queer or trans characters. Meanwhile, Broadway’s tendency to latch onto franchise properties that audiences have experienced countless times over — whether in books or GIFs or movie theaters — further encourages patterns of sameness...

Director Brett Haley’s new film, Hearts Beat Loud, is something of a Trojan horse. The first scenes give every indication that we’re going to see a lackluster update of High Fidelity. The main character, this time named Frank (Nick Offerman), like Fidelity‘s Rob, owns a record store and lectures women about music as if they don’t have opinions — or ears — of their own. But High Fidelity had no women as interesting as Frank’s daughter Sam (a radiant Kiersey Clemons)...

Reviews of "It's a Hard Truth, Ain't It", "The Miseducation of Cameron Post", "Call Her Ganda" and "Every Act of Life" at Tribeca Film Festival

2017 was a great year for queer films and queer filmmakers: Out queer directors helmed nearly half of my favorite films and are at the top of my ten-best list. But thanks to the homophobic notion (and self-fulfilling prophecy) that audiences will support only one queer film (you know which one) at a time, most people missed what I loved best, especially moviegoers who don’t live in New York City or L.A. (See the full results of the Village Voice Film Poll here)
My pick for the best film of th...

"The '50s weren't really like that," my mother used to say when I was a kid watching Happy Days. She insisted the show had denuded the 1950s of everything that defined it. In a South Boston diner when she and her friend played Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” on the jukebox, the older adults looked at them with contempt, as if they had come in arm-in-arm with Domino himself.
I was a queer teen in London in summer 1983, the time in which Call Me by Your Name takes place. Like the protagonist, El...

We were in the large ballroom of a posh hotel, where an anti-choice conference was welcoming its plenary speaker, the staunch and politically active homophobe (and opponent of condom distribution) Cardinal John O’Connor, from the New York Archdiocese. We were scattered throughout the seats, some of the women wearing wigs or hats to hide their tell-tale, super-short haircuts. I had rolled up and hidden a banner under my long wool coat. The group had agreed we would start the action...

While she was alive, Hedy Lamarr got zero credit or compensation for her part in the invention of the technology we now use for cell phones, secure wifi, bluetooth, and GPS. Known primarily as a 1940s film star, Lamarr appeared opposite Clark Gable in Boom Town and Comrade X and alongside co-stars Lana Turner and Judy Garland in Ziegfeld Girl, but it was her ability to be more than just the pretty face people likened her for that makes for a great story.
Now in theaters, Alexandra Dean's Bomb...

In Thelma, the new film from Norewegian writer-director Joachim Trier, the titular main character (Eili Harboe) is a solitary, first-year undergrad in a sparsely furnished city apartment. She's always alone, but still impatient enough with her rural helicopter parents (her father says of her Facebook page, "I see you're getting new friends") that she cuts short their phone calls. But when Thelma first notices another student, Anja (model and musician Kaya Wilkins), sitting next to her in the ...

With the unexpectedly deep and moving Professor Marston and the Wonder Women in theaters and the excellent and uncannily accurate BPM (Beats Per Minute) opening this week, audiences no longer have to go to queer film festivals to see good films about queer people created by queer filmmakers. But NewFest, the New York LGBTQ film festival that begins its 29th annual run this week (and includes a screening of Marston), continues to provide, in films from the past and current ones that delve into...

Portuguese writer-director João Pedro Rodrigues’s The Ornithologist starts out as a study...

Early in By Hook or by Crook, the 2002 film written and directed by Harry Dodge and Silas Howard, the main character, Shy (played by Howard), contemplates in voiceover the possibility of becoming a petty criminal: “I started thinking about all the crooks in the world, like presidents, senators, and cops.” That line, as well as much of what follows in Crook — even with its landlines and phonebooks — has a topical resonance rare even in recent releases.
Shy is trans, but nobody in the film appl...