In Terence Davies’ films, fathers tend to control the domestic sphere: the abusive patriarch in Distant Voices, Still Lives, based on Davies’ own father, prefigures those of Davies’ later literary adaptations. Editor’s note: This is the fifth feature in our Special Issue on Terence Davies’ A Quiet Passion, which can be read in full here.
Gender and Sexuality
Explore depictions of masculinity, femininity, and sexual identity.
Review: A Quiet Passion charts Emily Dickinson’s subtle rebellion
In A Quiet Passion, Terence Davies’ new biopic, Emily Dickinson, the famously reclusive poet, comes to life as an understated renegade, who deserts gendered orthodoxies to pursue her art. This is the first article in our Special Issue on A Quiet Passion.
Review: Close-Knit marks an important milestone for Japanese LGBTQ cinema
Naoko Ogigami’s Close-Knit is a charming, if disappointingly conservative, family drama about a girl who finds herself being raised by a transgender woman.
Julia Ducournau’s Raw is a new kind of female body horror
Mary Angela Rowe’s review of Raw. Cannibalism is definitely a lady problem in Julia Ducournau’s Raw, but the film isn’t about the horror of female sexuality so much as the twisted results of shoving young women into a pressure cooker of experiences and expectations.
Hello Destroyer explores the thin line between hockey menace and model
Kevan Funk’s Hello Destroyer is a hockey movie where the drama is not in the game, but in how its violence has consequences that ripple off the ice.
Unlearning toxic masculinity in the Dardennes’ La Promesse
Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s 1996 film, La Promesse (The Promise), examines how a teenage boy unlearns patriarchal values through his relationship with an undocumented Burkinabé immigrant.