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 ...

Whenever actors who started their careers as children give interviews I wait for them to talk about money. Sarah Jessica Parker has stated that the considerable income she generated as a minor was, cryptically enough, "absorbed into the family." The new film Honey Boy, directed by Alma Har'el with a script by star Shia LaBeouf (based on his own life as a child and adult actor) doesn't indulge in Parker's euphemism.
LaBeouf play James, an abusive, neglectful, lying parent who is also a stand-i...

Quick, name the Mexican-American singer who scored chart-topping hits from the late 1960s to the tail-end of the '80s, who put out six platinum-selling albums in a row in the '70s, and whose former touring musicians went on to become one of the most popular '70s bands. You say you don't know who that guy is? Yes, you do: That "guy" is Linda Ronstadt (those musicians in her touring band were Glenn Frey and Don Henley, who went on to form Eagles.)
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, the new ...

the second record from Boston-based rapper Oompa, may have just been released last week, but its roots stretch back to the artist’s childhood. “When I started rapping in middle school, I was a chubby, braided-up kid,” says the former Women of the World poetry slam champion. “People called me ‘Queen Latifah’ or ‘Cleo’ [the name of the queer character Latifah played in the 1996 film Set It Off].”
Oompa felt drawn to Latifah’s character in the film. As she got older, she had a realization: “One ...

Here's Ren Jender on a Sundance movie that moved straight into theaters this weekend...

Writer-director Kitty Green's The Assistant (now open in NYC and LA) is a Jeanne Dielman-like examination of a woman who is the newest assistant in Harvey Weinstein's office (though he's never named) in the time before the revelations of his rape and harassment of women came to light. The film delves into how serial sexual harassment makes the entire office (and of course the industry) complicit, even when...

Here's Ren Jender filing her final report from Sundance 2020...

Sundance didn't have a big queer film this year, as they have in many previous years (most recently in 2018, when director Desiree Akhavan's The Miseducation of Cameron Post won the Grand Jury Dramatic Prize) but with this year's awards came the news that a black, queer woman, Tabitha Jackson, would take over from outgoing, longtime Sundance Film Festival Director John Cooper. Jackson also made news on the first day of the festiv...

Ren Jender reporting from Sundance

Director Julie Taymor's The Glorias adapted (by Taymor and Sarah Ruhl) from Gloria Steinem's 2015 book "My Life on the Road" premiered this past Sunday at Sundance to long applause and a talk afterward between Steinem and Taymor. But those who have read Steinem's books and paid more than cursory attention to her feminist activism will be disappointed in how clunky and oversimplified the script is. One groan-worthy device has Gloria, at various ages, (the maj...

Please welcome new contributor Ren Jender reporting from Sundance...

At first glance Cuties, the debut feature from French-Senegalese director Maïmouna Doucouré has a strong resemblance to Mati Diop's Atlantics. Like Ada, Atlantics' main character, Cuties' Amy (Fathia Youssouf) is torn between the edicts of her Senegalese parents' strict Muslim faith (an early scene shows Amy wearing a headscarf --even though she's only 11-- as she listens to the sermon on the virtues of modesty) and more hed...

New contributor Ren Jender reporting from Sundance...

In 2014, Mexican police attacked students from a rural teachers' college, Ayotzinapa (known as a hotbed of leftist activism) in Iguala, Guerrero. They killed six of the students but injured many more and abducted another 43, who have never been found. In his new documentary Vivos, artist Ai WeiWei (Human Flow) focuses on the families left behind (and in limbo) When the families speak about the disappearance of their sons, siblings and part...

Tereza Cervenova/Courtesy of Hulu
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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)...