The Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s rule-defying female leads and leitmotifs (defiance, forbidden love, and obstructed mourning) are so consistent that his last three films, Gloria, A Fantastic Woman—awarded this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film—and Disobedience, could count as a trilogy on a woman’s quest for respect, ardor, and erotic freedom. His spirited, front-and-center heroines […]

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On May 19, 2018, more than 50 million Americans and Britons turned on their televisions to watch Meghan Markle, a freckled, brunette American previously best known for co-starring in the basic-cable legal drama Suits, marry Henry Charles Albert David No-Last-Name, also known as the Duke of Sussex, an equally freckled, very ginger English veteran who […]

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Nobody writes better about the obsessive nature of desire, about head-over-heels infatuation, than Egyptian expat André Aciman. I savored his latest book, Enigma Variations—about a bisexual man’s history of amorous escapades—happily absorbed through a mid-March blizzard. It seemed against the odds that a movie could do justice to Aciman’s gorgeous, neo-Proustian prose, but director Luca […]

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The more I’ve been following the #MeToo movement, with its dismaying, even shocking revelations about the ubiquity of harassment, sexual coercion in the workplace, and even rape, the more I’ve been longing to revisit the incredibly pertinent second season of ABC’s American Crime. The show focuses, with unremitting power, on the alleged sexual assault of […]

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The water in my eyes didn’t rise for Erik Stevens, aka Killmonger, a fictional character played by Michael B. Jordan in director Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster superhero film, Black Panther. The water in my eyes didn’t fall for the ancestors that Erik evokes in his final speech, either. The tears on my face as—spoiler alert—the only […]

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