Feminist Film Criticism

Varda connects discarded food, her aging body and digital filming, asking who defines value and why intimacy must still acknowledge unequal power.

There's no rioting, protesting, or marching for civil rights here. Jeanne Dielman, single mother and sometime sex worker, has a simple life: laundry, dinner, the occasional john. The mundanity of being a housewife is on achingly tedious display for three-plus hours in Chantal Akerman's experimental film. And that's why it's brilliant.

Sarah Maldoror follows Maria’s search for her husband in colonial Angola, revealing care and communication as infrastructure for anticolonial resistance.

Kelly and Sarah discuss popular films through feminism, asking how pleasure, gendered power and criticism can coexist.