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Dion Kagan
Dion Kagan is an erstwhile lecturer in gender studies who is now a book editor and an arts critic.
The opening sequence of Happy End, the latest film from French director and provocateur Michael Haneke, is a funny–shocking series of domestic events captured via a livestreaming social media platform like Snapchat or Instagram. It shows the bedtime routine of a depressed, emotionally vacant woman. A pet hamster falls victim to an experiment with antidepressants. Then the woman too falls unconsc ... (read more)
Tom of Finland is a worthy enshrinement of the life of Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen (1920–91) into the cinematic pantheon of queer historical biographies. The World War II veteran and advertising art director best known as ‘Tom of Finland’ drew thousands of naked and leather-clad men with gigantic nipples and enormous penises. Cumulatively, the language of playful hypermasculinity in his d ... (read more)
As long as there have been moving images, people have fretted about cinema’s special dexterity at breaching sexual and social norms. We now have sophisticated tools to help us understand these breaches and the anxieties they trigger, and the privileged relationship of these dynamics to certain film genres and cycles. For example, women’s home-wrecking desires menaced the unconscious universe o ... (read more)
Queen of the Desert recreates the life and times of British colonial explorer, cartographer, writer, and eventually Foreign Office adviser, Gertrude Bell (Nicole Kidman), whose intimate knowledge of Bedouin culture played a key role in the re-mapping of the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s. As German auteur Werner Herzog's first feature in six years, and with ... (read more)
In the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, an expat American teacher goes down into the subterranean bathroom beneath the National Palace of Culture, a known beat. There he encounters Mitko, a young Bulgarian hustler. Through foreign words with plural and ambiguous meanings, they negotiate a sexual transaction that initiates an intense, potentially ruinous relationship. Garth Greenwell's masterly début, Wh ... (read more)
Emanuel Levy has had a prestigious career as a senior critic at Variety, professor of film and sociology, and jury member at fifty-four international film festivals. His exhaustive account of the careers of five gay male auteurs is peppered with quotes from his own interviews with them. This awfully titled book may frustrate some readers, including Levy's peers in screen studies, to whom it will s ... (read more)
The Sex Myth announces some lofty aspirations in its title, which invokes game-changing feminist interventions like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth (1991). Saturated as we are now by sex talk of all kinds, it is hard to imagine a critique of sex/gender mores having anything like the same impact. Nonetheless, Rachel Hills makes her bold ambitions clear ... (read more)
In David Fincher’s slick adaptation of Gone Girl, an attractive white woman, Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary and her husband, Nick (Ben Affleck), quickly becomes the prime suspect.
Left behind at their Missouri McMansion are signs of a violent struggle – glass coffee table smashed, antique ottoman overturned, a copious amount of blood mopped up haphazard ... (read more)
U nder the Skin is adapted from Michael Faber’s eponymous speculative fiction novel (2000) in which an alien disguised as an attractive woman hunts hitchhikers in the Scottish highlands. Once she has determined that a man is appropriate prey, she drugs him and delivers him to a subterranean abattoir hidden beneath a farm where, in a disturbing allegorisation of factory farming, he is castrated, ... (read more)