Friday, November 11 2011
Let’s Get Physical: In Praise of Kay Kendall’s Joie De Vivre
Kay Kendall's mercurial performances in George Cukor's Les Girls and Vincente Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante highlight a romantic Englishwoman and her knack for graceful physical comedy.
Friday, September 9 2011
Connect the Dots: Transgender Narratives in Pop Culture
Transgender representation in modern film, television, and literature blurs the lines of gender, class, race and sexuality, which is precisely why trans narratives are still considered dangerous.
Friday, April 8 2011
Passing Me By: African American Women and ‘Passing’ As a Film Genre
Caught between two worlds, standing on a near-literal precipice with one foot in the African American experience, the other firmly in majority white culture, the protagonist of the passing film is confronted with an impossible choice: live in truth as a person of color or risk “passing” for white to gain societal advantage.
Thursday, January 6 2011
Suffragette City’s Best of 2010 Cinema
What’s black and white and blue all over? 2010’s finest films. Suffragette City investigates all of the major awards categories, offering up choices that are about as far a field from the Hollywood/Oscar PR machine as one can get!
Friday, November 19 2010
Politicking with ‘Made in Dagenham’‘s Miranda Richardson
Miranda Richardson discusses this season's premiere feminism-themed film about the real-life strike at the UK Ford plant that challenged and changed British laws on equal pay. Just how far have we come since 1968 in the fight for gender equality in the workplace?
Friday, July 30 2010
Barbequing with Legends: Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek on Cinema, Cinephilia and Good-Looking Shoes
On the eve of the release of Get Low, PopMatters talks with film legends Sissy Spacek and Robert Duvall about food criticism (sort of), film critics (without mentioning any, ahem, names), and of course, cute shoes (and a few other things).
Wednesday, May 19 2010
Essential Female Melodrama: ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’
Endorsed by the esteemed Susan Sontag as among the best films about women, Fassbinder's unique approach to the feminine psyche remains as daring today as it was when released in 1972.
Friday, March 12 2010
Mama Said Knock You Out: An Interview with Mother Director Bong Joon-ho
Korea has quickly become a hot spot for some of the most engaging female film performances in the world. This reputation is only bolstered by Kim Hye-ja's sharp turn as the resourceful Mother.
Friday, January 8 2010
Everything in its Right Place: The Best Female Acting Performances of 2009
Mazur checks out the year's best female acting and offers up a mostly alternative opinion to the boring Oscar-begging consensus picks including some you might not have heard about, yet.
Friday, November 13 2009
An Education: Carey Mulligan Comes of Age
Danish director Lone Scherfig spares audiences the trite clichés of a young woman's coming of age, directs a magnificent cast of actors, and defends her film against allegations of inappropriate sexuality.
Monday, August 24 2009
Emmy Nominations / Emmy Abominations
And the nominees for Best 'White' Actress on Television are… the exact same group of women who are nominated every single year by the unimaginative voting bloc.
Thursday, June 18 2009
Ingmar Bergman: No Man is an Island
Bergman’s need to honor, discover and examine his intrinsic connection to women is quite simple: all men are influenced by women.
Friday, May 22 2009
Abnormally Attracted to Sin: Tori Amos Talks with PopMatters
On the eve of the release of her tenth album, Amos chatted about collaborating with rock Gods and Goddesses, how bootlegs could potentially cause divorce, and why a gal sometimes just needs a good wig to add an extra element of surprise to both her marriage and her live show.
Friday, April 17 2009
‘Grey Gardens’: Where Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange Bloom
HBO’s dedication to quality parts for women gallantly shows through and has even changed the landscape of television as we know it.
Friday, February 20 2009
The Oscar Expert Eyes This Year’s Pageantry
My qualifications for discussing actresses and the Oscars? I’m gay and have watched the awards for more than 25 years now. If that doesn’t make me an Oscar expert, clearly nothing does.
Monday, January 26 2009
No Girl So Sweet and ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’
At first fearing a British Amelie, Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky surprisingly became Mazur’s favorite film of 2008.
Monday, December 8 2008
The Annihilating Feminine: Kate Winslet Gets Nasty in The Reader
In Winslet’s clever, low-key performance, all of the character’s ambiguousness remains intact, making Hanna her most complicated, mature creation to date.
Monday, November 10 2008
I’ve Loved You So Long: Interviews with Kristin Scott Thomas and Philippe Claudel
Kristin Scott Thomas delivers the performance of the year in Philippe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long, and tells Mazur how she did it.
Monday, October 13 2008
The Secret Life of Bees
What could have been a brave film turned out lukewarm, lost in its own self-importance, stripped of its feminist overtones and watered down for mass consumption.
Friday, August 29 2008
Katrin Cartlidge: The Working Actress
Whether it was through silence, grotesquerie, fury or intelligence (or, at times, lack of intelligence), Cartlidge was not afraid to upturn the dark corners of the women she portrayed.
Wednesday, August 6 2008
The Bombing of Bonneville
Bonneville is firmly committed to the “Female Gaze” in an industry where everything is geared towards only what men want to see.
Monday, July 14 2008
Michelle Pfeiffer as Pfeminist
I Could Never Be Your Woman is the lone feminist antidote in a sea of venomous, misogynist, adolescent male comedies that people turn out for en masse.
