Sarah Kerr

Wonder Woman: The Weird, True Story

How the superheroine was a “missing link” in American feminism

Iran’s Hidden Turmoil: Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men

‘Women Without Men’ is the Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat’s first feature-length film, and also her first intended for viewing in theaters. But Neshat is well known in the art world for a series of shorter art videos she began making in the late 1990s.

Beauty Disturbed: Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces

In the summer of 1989, I spent several weeks in Madrid. It was my first time out of the United States, and I was overwhelmed by the shock of difference: the life-giving daily approach to time; the ghost dregs of imperial supremacy; the post-Franco traces of bleak limbo that were thankfully almost done eroding; the particular charisma, not quite the same as what I had absorbed from so far away, in books and movies, as “European charm.” There was a pop soundtrack to that summer, an album that had come out months earlier but was still at its viral peak. One addictive song especially spilled out of windows onto plazas, with a stately beat and a girlish voice recalling (from the male point of view) an affair with a woman described as half-finished, with the body of a gypsy and “an eye here, a tooth there.”

Bolaño & Drugs

The Triumph of Roberto Bolaño

Displaced Passions

Nathan, Farewell

In the Terror House of Mirrors

The Unclosed Circle

The Girl in the Woods

Burdens of Inheritance

Memories of Underdevelopment

Small Expectations

Working Girl

Tender Buttons

The Confidence Men

Rain Man

The Mystery of Mexican Politics

Amplifying ‘The Piano’

Shoot the Piano Player