Another Gaze

Tomatometer-approved publication
Rating Title/Year Author
A Wild Stream (Una corriente salvaje) (2018) Kendra McLaughlin The non-male gaze in Una corriente salvaje accentuates the instances where machismo blurs into subtle homoeroticism that occur in Omar and Chilo's growing emotional intimacy. EDIT
Posted Apr 19, 2019
Nervous Translation (2017) Hannah Paveck Nervous Translation continually reminds us of the limits and partiality of its child perspective, even as it presents glimpses of Val's own interiority. EDIT
Posted Apr 2, 2019
Cam (2018) Annette LePique Both Mazzei and Brewer are at their best, and Cam at its most unsettling, when they explore how an economy of loneliness fuels the frightening appearance of an online double that threatens Alice's life and livelihood. EDIT
Posted Apr 1, 2019
() Emily Watlington Even the film's title implies that the thirty-seven seconds for which Yuma did not breathe when she was born define her entire story. We learn little about Yuma that does not relate to her disability. EDIT
Posted Mar 12, 2019
The Favourite (2018) Katherine Connell Despite the empathy that actors have for their characters, the hyper ironic and self-aware stylisation gives Lanthimos a smug authoritative 'smartness' over everything depicted on-screen. EDIT
Posted Mar 6, 2019
Destroyer (2018) Rebecca Liu Karyn Kusama sketches out the architecture for an impressive epic of desire, guilt, and shame that moves the police drama past its generic, one-note and largely male roots. EDIT
Posted Feb 27, 2019
() Hannah Proctor The evocative and sometimes visceral sound design is one of the most interesting aspects of the film. EDIT
Posted Feb 25, 2019
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) Katherine Connell Can You Ever Forgive Me showcases Heller's flare for giving voice to women characters who express dangerousness and intensity through blunt humour. EDIT
Posted Feb 19, 2019
House of Hummingbird (Beolsae) (2018) Missouri Williams House of Hummingbird is a tactile film, preoccupied by textures - of fabric, greenery, concrete, exhaustion. EDIT
Posted Feb 19, 2019
The Ground Beneath My Feet (Der Boden unter den Füssen) (2019) Missouri Williams The Ground Beneath My Feet is dead-on with its note of family fear, the reciprocal sickness it summons. EDIT
Posted Feb 13, 2019
Un amour impossible (2018) Gabriella Beckhurst Corsini's ending is refreshing precisely because it understands that finding sustainable ways to live in the wake of trauma aren't neatly cinched by vengeance. EDIT
Posted Jan 24, 2019
Roma (2018) Phoebe Chen However easy it is to dismiss a static or slow camera as performing attentiveness, it works - I have never looked so hard at soapsuds. EDIT
Posted Jan 23, 2019
Suspiria (2018) Rebecca Liu It is an argument that confuses stylishness with subtext and empty signifiers with intellectual heft. EDIT
Posted Dec 17, 2018
Disobedience (2017) Leon Craig The film shows the diversity within the Orthodox community and the changes that Lelio makes to the ending of Naomi Alderman's book present us with a more hopeful vision. EDIT
Posted Dec 12, 2018
Touch Me Not (2018) Emily Watlington Touch Me Not counters dominant ableist cinematic tropes that cast disabled people as asexual or undesirable... EDIT
Posted Dec 4, 2018
3 Days in Quiberon (2018) Alice Blackhurst Three Days in Quiberon refuses to freeze Schneider in rote postures of suffering and instead presents the actress as occasionally joyous, reckless, and self-aware without being self-obsessed. EDIT
Posted Nov 21, 2018
Burning (2018) Phoebe Chen Although nothing is explicitly surreal, there are enough off-kilter intrusions to cast the everyday in an odd light, where the inexplicable opens a story to unseen possibilities. EDIT
Posted Nov 14, 2018
Petra (2018) Hannah Paveck At a time when the feminist revenge narrative risks a descent into cliché, Rosales's decision to withhold the film's central affective event... proves all the more effective. EDIT
Posted Oct 25, 2018
Widows (2018) Rebecca Liu This is not some faux-empowerment story dressed up in infantilising 'girl power' credo. EDIT
Posted Oct 19, 2018
Una (2016) Natalia Winkelman How do we fairly portray a nymphet? Are we obliged to render her a miserable purple-lipped corpse, as Una chooses to do? EDIT
Posted Oct 16, 2018
Crazy Rich Asians (2018) Rebecca Liu This is the accidental genius of Crazy Rich Asians; it shows how wealth, in the end, makes fools of us all. EDIT
Posted Oct 11, 2018
Assassination Nation (2018) Laura Staab Levinson's parody veers very quickly away from critique, into complicity. EDIT
Posted Oct 8, 2018
Vision (2018) Katherine Connell Kawase's conviction in executing this narrative, combined with Binoche's communicative facial expressivity maintain a hold on their audience, convincing them to remain in cinematic disorientation for a little bit longer. EDIT
Posted Oct 2, 2018
Her Smell (2018) Chelsea Phillips-Carr The film is unwieldy, a brash regurgitation of cinematic and narrative styles with a regressive heart. EDIT
Posted Sep 27, 2018
The Rider (2017) Rebecca Liu The beauty of Zhao's film is that it celebrates being human without veering into sentimentality. EDIT
Posted Sep 20, 2018
Where Hands Touch (2018) Katherine Connell While Amma Asante has assigned herself a weighty responsibility in taking on Where Hands Touch, she certainly understands the weight. EDIT
Posted Sep 17, 2018
Searching for Ingmar Bergman (2018) Chelsea Phillips-Carr By reiterating her own cinematic output, cultural importance, and significance in the story, von Trotta rather uses Bergman as a launchpad to discuss authorship and challenge the idea of a canon. EDIT
Posted Sep 14, 2018
Out of Blue (2018) Katherine Connell A much needed camp parody of Hitchcockian proportions, told from a female perspective. Morley and her cast know exactly when to ham it up and when to build genuine emotive tension. EDIT
Posted Sep 11, 2018
The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018) Rebecca Liu Cameron Post does not quite fit the label of a comedy, nor a drama, but manages to do the best of both. EDIT
Posted Sep 11, 2018
The Receptionist (2016) Rebecca Liu Tina and Sasa's friendship in particular is one of the strongest parts of the film, as the two women learn to understand the origins of each other's prickliness. EDIT
Posted Aug 14, 2018
A Beautiful Day (2017) Katie Goh Pulls the rug out from under the hyper-masculine action genre. EDIT
Posted Aug 8, 2018
Leave No Trace (2018) Hannah Paveck Its tender portrait of the relationship between father and daughter defamiliarises our fixed, often one-way understandings of care. EDIT
Posted Jul 20, 2018
Alanis (2017) Bedatri D. Choudhury Alanis is not a film about conscience or morality but about the insistence of a woman's autonomy over her body. EDIT
Posted Jul 5, 2018
Ocean's 8 (2018) Rebecca Liu There is a cathartic and sophisticated release in seeing Sandra Bullock and her talented pals navigate the feminised realms... readily abandoning all morals to acquire these goods in covetous but calculated lust. EDIT
Posted Jun 25, 2018
Revenge (2017) Rebecca Liu Revenge is as much a jarringly smart exploration of gendered violence as it is a slasher spectacle. EDIT
Posted Jun 20, 2018
Western (2017) Hannah Paveck Western explores masculinity through a practice of 'radical observation' without judgment, attuned to the subtlest of gestures. EDIT
Posted Jun 13, 2018
Lean on Pete (2017) Rebecca Liu The film exposes the emptiness at the heart of the American self-made man. EDIT
Posted May 25, 2018
Tully (2018) Helen Charman Tully endorses the very conditions it pretends to expose. EDIT
Posted May 23, 2018
Fugue (2018) Missouri Williams An assured and gripping work, animated by the same intense visual poetry of [Smoczynska's] earlier film. EDIT
Posted May 23, 2018
Se rokh (2018) Missouri Williams Three Faces is a subtle and beautiful exploration of female relationships. EDIT
Posted May 21, 2018
Happy as Lazzaro (2018) Ruth Novaczek A broad and complex tapestry of the ancient and modern whose subtlety wins us over despite its impossible leaps of faith. EDIT
Posted May 21, 2018
Girls of the Sun (2018) Missouri Williams Girls of the Sun is a big-budget war movie... It's emotional; at times overdone. But it's also powerful and moving. EDIT
Posted May 16, 2018
Angel Face (Gueule d'ange) (2018) Missouri Williams Angel Face is a rare find... Many of the film's criticisms feel motivated less by the forgivable shakiness of a debut film and more by the contempt that we feel as a society for women with problems. EDIT
Posted May 14, 2018
One Day (Egy nap) (2018) Missouri Williams One Day is a truly brilliant and original perspective on motherhood, a refusal to shy away from or prettify the gruelling work that having children entails. EDIT
Posted May 11, 2018
mother! (2017) Laura Staab Should we require a satire of misogynistic violence executed in the name of creation, we do not need it from Aronofsky, who is all extremes, no nuance. EDIT
Posted May 7, 2018
Un beau soleil intérieur (2017) Hannah Paveck Let the Sunshine In is a very different kind of film, both in its engagement with the romantic comedy genre and its audiovisual style. EDIT
Posted Apr 25, 2018
Isle of Dogs (2018) Rebecca Liu Isle of Dogs is ultimately a movie about a Japan contained within the American imagination, offering a cultural 'homage' that resembles something a white 18-year-old gamer with a poster of Sailor Moon in his room might produce. EDIT
Posted Apr 23, 2018
Obscuro Barroco (2018) Hannah Paveck Obscuro Barroco privileges other ways of knowing: a material engagement with the world that neither fixes nor categorises, but makes space for new becomings. EDIT
Posted Apr 3, 2018
Ready Player One (2018) Imogen West-Knights As long as you're willing to ask little in the way of intellectual or emotional stimulation, Ready Player One is a great day out. EDIT
Posted Apr 2, 2018
Una mujer fantástica (2017) Alice Blackhurst A Fantastic Woman resonates most strongly as a story about who is permitted to grieve. EDIT
Posted Mar 19, 2018