Shonni Enelow

2 months ago | criterion.com | Rachel Syme |Shonni Enelow

Essays— Feb 18, 2025 In November of 1988, just a few months after the release of her fourth feature film, Crossing Delancey, the fifty-three-year-old director Joan Micklin Silver gave an interview at the American Film Institute, in which she made a passionate case for women’s pictures, by which she meant pictures directed by—and therefore thoroughly infused with the sensibility of—women.

Jul 29, 2024 | criterion.com | Shonni Enelow

What was pop Shakespeare? In the 1980s and ’90s, every year or two delivered another movie version of a Shakespeare play, performed straight, or wholly adapted, or somewhere in between. These were often in modern dress, and typically mixed the plays’ language with a hypercontemporary style, with popular music and up-to-the-minute cultural references—to brands, urban landscapes, social conflicts.

Mar 28, 2023 | criterion.com | Shonni Enelow

Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) speaks so pointedly to the current cultural moment that it feels in some ways clairvoyant, despite resting on a historical context that is long gone. I want to say that this is a film about love bombing, about narcissism, about ambiguous consent—and it is—but these contemporary terms also seem insufficient to describe its humor and sadness, its sympathy with and mockery of the idea of romantic love.