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 ...

Review of Sundance Film Festival's "The Stroll"

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...

Q &. A with Jeanna Kadlec, author of "Heretic: A Memoir".

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...

REVIEW of "A League of Their Own" TV Series: While uneven in its execution, Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham’s reboot justifies its own existence

Q & A with Hugh Ryan, whose new book “The Women’s House of Detention” spotlights a crossroads of Black, trans and gay liberation

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...

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...

Right now, it feels like an early ’90s resurgence. Sinead O’Connor and the Rugrats are all over the media, and ACT UP is in the news again.
The latest book from writer and ACT UP Oral History co-director Sarah Schulman (also a co-founder of the Avengers!) Let the Record Show which covers ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, a direct action group, from 1987-1993 and is mostly made up of interview snippets from the Oral History Project. Schulman spoke to INTO by phone shortly after the ...

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 ...

I chuckled a little when I first saw that director Pablo Larraín’s latest film, Spencer, a biopic of Princess Diana, hands the leading role to Kristen Stewart. In the space of about a year, two queer actors, Stewart and Emma Corrin, (who received a Golden Globe for portraying Diana on the most recent season of The Crown) have played not only one of the most famous straight women in the world, but also one who came into the public eye because of her heterosexual relationship. I’m old enough to...