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 ...

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...

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...

Whether you’re recovering from Friendsgiving or from being holed up with your laptop in your childhood bedroom, desperately hoping the far flung relatives you just shared a table with aren’t lying about their vax status, you need some decent queer art as a palate cleanser. Instead of giving The L Word: Generation Q another chance (you will be disappointed) check out movies (and one TV show) that are actually good and that you (and everyone else) haven’t already seen countless times. The follo...

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...

I’ll confess: sometime in the early 2000s I kind of gave up on queer film festivals. I still made the effort to attend some of the better-reviewed selections, but unlike in the early to mid ’90s, when much of what I’d seen was nonfiction, experimental, or made by activists (sometimes all three), one after another bland, smiley queer rom-com or tepid drama made their way onto the circuit. The one thing the films all had in common was that after seeing them, I always felt as if I had just exper...

Only six of the 82 feature films set to play the Sundance Film Festival are listed on its site as “LGBTQ Stories,” with no regard for who made or wrote those stories. Queer culture still has a long way to go in being recognized even at a festival as progressive as Sundance, which starts on Thursday and is, in wake of the Omicron surge, being held virtually, meaning that anyone with an internet connection and money for a ticket can see its films online.
That said, the queer films on that very ...

Straight people discovering a beloved queer artist can be tricky. Of course everyone wants their favorite artists to be successful, but what if, in trying to maintain their popularity, those artists start to pander to their new fans?
Seeing what straight people make of Petite Maman, the new film from writer-director Celine Sciamma after her 2019 tour-de-force Portrait of a Lady on Fire should be instructive. Lady was the rare film made by a queer woman about queer women that was an art house ...