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Oct 9, 2024 | 
reverseshot.org | Eileen G'Sell |Eileen G’Sell
Empty Vessels By Eileen G’Sell New York Film Festival 2024: Transamazonia Pia Marais, France/Germany/Switzerland/Taiwan/Brazil, no distributor Moonlit mosquito nets soft as ghosts. Ants swarming a muddy hand. A naked man screaming down an unpaved road. A lace peter-pan collar beneath a young girl’s lacerated face.
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
reverseshot.org | Eileen G'Sell
Father Time By Eileen G’Sell Daughters Dir. Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, U.S., Netflix A black-and-white montage flashes clips of girls primping for a formal affair—pulling up stockings, clasping a string of pearls, fastening the strap to a silver Mary Jane. The image is grainy, and the frame is shrunk to resemble a Super 8 reel. Strings trill and piano keys tinkle. One by one, the girls peer out the windows of the bus that will take them to a line of freshly shaven and suited men.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
brightwalldarkroom.com | Eileen G'Sell |Eileen G’Sell
The summer of 1999, I saw Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run twice on the big screen. This was unusual—not only for the lack of student rates at the local art house theater, but because my teen years were hardly marked by the cinephilia of my adulthood, let alone a penchant for foreign-language titles.
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May 31, 2024 | 
reverseshot.org | Eileen G'Sell |Eileen G’Sell
Good Griefs By Eileen G’Sell Handling the Undead Dir. Thea Hvistendahl, Norway, NEON There are times when loss is so terrifying, so brutally eviscerating, that only the horror genre can do it justice. Natalie Erika James’s Relic (2020) and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) are but two films from the past decade in which the supernatural allows us (sometimes literally) to peel back the skin of our own mortality and peek at the darkness beneath.
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May 30, 2024 | 
chroni.cl | Eileen G'Sell |Keith Negley |Eileen G’Sell
My co-instructor and I knew we had our work cut out for us. The seminar was “Modern Media: The Good, the Bad, and the Future” — and our students were arguably closer to the material than we were. I’m an Xennial raised on TGIF sitcomsand Christopher Pike paperbacks. In high school, I sent saucy Hotmail messages to a crush at a rival school while the nuns at my Catholic school taught us PageMaker.
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May 30, 2024 | 
chronicle.com | Eileen G'Sell |Keith Negley |Eileen G’Sell
My co-instructor and I knew we had our work cut out for us. The seminar was “Modern Media: The Good, the Bad, and the Future” — and our students were arguably closer to the material than we were. I’m an Xennial raised on TGIF sitcomsand Christopher Pike paperbacks. In high school, I sent saucy Hotmail messages to a crush at a rival school while the nuns at my Catholic school taught us PageMaker.
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Apr 18, 2024 | 
currentaffairs.org | Eileen G'Sell |Andrew Ancheta
Journalist Josie Cox is the author of the new book Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality, a history of the 20th century women’s movement that documents the remarkable courage of the women who gave us suffrage, abortion rights, and greater equality across many dimensions of social and economic life. Today she joins to discuss how those gains were made, but also the failures (such as the story of the Equal Rights Amendment).
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
reverseshot.org | Eileen G'Sell |Eileen G’Sell
All Grown Up By Eileen G’Sell In its 40-year history, Sundance has premiered no small number of iconic coming-of-age films, many of which effectively launched a director’s career: Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), Todd Solondz’s blackhearted take on a middle school outcast; Thirteen (2003), Catherine Hardwicke’s gritty account of a teenager’s fall from grace; or Noah Baumbach’s autobiographical hit The Squid and the Whale (2005).
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Oct 12, 2023 | 
reverseshot.org | Eileen G'Sell |Eileen G’Sell
Fairer Sex By Eileen G’Sell Poor Things Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, U.S./U.K./Ireland, Searchlight Pictures Yorgos Lanthimos is hardly famous for a high-minded depiction of women. His female characters have been known to knock out their own canines, secretly blind one another, hurl themselves off balconies, and binge so hard on tiny cakes that their stomachs can’t contain it. They are, by turns, crass, robotic, detached, deranged, and mercenary.
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Aug 2, 2023 | 
reverseshot.org | Eileen G'Sell |Eileen G’Sell
Wonder Ward By Eileen G’Sell Our Body Claire Simon, France, Cinema Guild A sunny day. A shadow. A woman moving through space. Appropriate for a film that often grapples with mortality, the first shot of Claire Simon’s Our Body is aimed at the ground, the camera tilted toward the pavement. The shadow belongs to the filmmaker, who, as invisible as she is for most of the documentary, is also its first protagonist.
