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“Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us,” a two-part retrospective of thirty films

Mindy Aloff

Presented by the Japan Society and Metrograph, New York City, 2025 Mikio Naruse. Photo © Toho. In the United States, the term “women’s picture” generally refers to a film, released between the 1930s and the end of the century, with a melodramatic story concerning women’s emotions, presented from a woman’s point of view. The melodramas are often exaggerated in their details of relationships, and the most important relationships tend to be between women. They rarely

On the Cover 3.3

Cynthia Payne

The Beautiful: small scale, gentle luminosity.Sublime: territorial, vast, craggy, un-domesticated, borderless, immense, unknown,awful, monumental, transcendent, transcending. —Elizabeth Alexander, “American Sublime” Amy Sherald’s current exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art, American Sublime, fills in through image and word a crucial absence in American painting. Sherald’s portraits stake their territory neither in the wilderness or land to be conquered, nor in the transcendent as conceived by American Protestant traditions. Instead the subjects of these paintings

Editors’ Letter 3.3

Jennifer Baumgardner

Dear Readers, In the latest entry in total waste of time, I spent an hour disabling the default AI writing features that, in the last few months, have invaded my email (Google) and the software I use to draft articles (Word). Words and whole sentences are suggested, in a reputedly “personal” style, interrupting my own train of thought. After I erase them, they remain in my mind’s eye, an afterburn, while I try to recall

Poetry Comment 3.3

Katha Pollitt

Is there any subject that has the reader more auto-matically on a poet’s side than the death of someone beloved? Not only is it a universal experience, it’s one that grows ever more common the older we get. The classic elegies are for the young—Ben Jonson on the death of his small son, Theodore Roethke’s “Elegy for Jane: My Student, Thrown by a Horse.” Now that we have more older women poets, widowhood is coming

“New York Love Stories” on the Criterion Channel

Charis Caputo

Courtesy of the Criterion Channel. Joan Micklin Silver’s romantic comedy Crossing Delancey (1988) opens in a dimly lit bookstore on the Upper East Side. “They want to pull us down and make something clean and tall and obscenely profitable arise out of our ashes,” the bookstore’s owner tells a group of literary luminaries assembled for a fundraiser. “But we are here! . . . New York’s last real bookstore will be around for a good

On the Sixtieth Anniversary of Agnès Varda’s “Le bonheur”

Meg Whiteford

A still from Le bonheur (1965). In the summer in New York City, every bodega you pass sells flowers, and every bodega selling flowers sells sunflowers, which do look a lot like the sun as a child might draw the sun: with distinct triangular rays and a smiling brown face in the center. Sixty years ago, Agnès Varda opened her film Le bonheur with an image of a sunflower, a florist’s symbol of loyalty. Did

How Liz Wallace’s “The Rule” Became Alison’s “Bechdel Test”

Mary-Kate Wilson

The Bechdel Test has become shorthand, a feminist seal of approval for movie goers who care about broadening roles for broads. Alison Bechdel’s papers at Smith College’s women’s history collection offer a fascinating glimpse into her creative process making Dykes to Watch Out For, including an installment in 1986 titled “The Rule” that spawned her most far-reaching contribution to culture. Bechdel’s first drafts tended to be notes scrawled on a storyboard, no images yet, with

“Liberation,” Roundabout Theatre Company, New York, NY
“Free to Be . . . You and Me: 50 Years of Stories and Songs,” The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, MA
“Macbeth in Stride,” Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY

Jennifer Baumgardner

Along with the National Organization for Women and the American Association of University Women (AAUW), Ms. magazine was feminism when I was a kid. I grew up in 1970s Fargo, where my mom subscribed to Ms. and was a member of AAUW. A Ms. mom was different than a mom who read Ladies’ Home Journal, less likely to sew clothes for your Barbie doll or make bread-dough ornaments (though my mom baked her own bread).

Sandwiches

Pat Lipsky

Many times, on studio visits to friends, when I didn’t entirely love the work,I would exclaim, “Beautiful loft.” After, when we had left the neighborhood forever and life had become quiet and difficult, I thought about the parties. Every day in SoHo was the same: you worked, drank, stayed up late. Weekends didn’t matter. So parties came on Tuesday or Thursday, after openings. The whole pregame ritual of it—pulling on jeans and a sweater, doing

“Ash November” & “Minimalism”

Alissa Quart

Ash November They are saying AI is a poet now, that you are ashes now. That the drink killed you. They are saying that the “working class” has united against itself.I am taking this personally. The poor have “decision fatigue” and now we all do, unfortunate revision of solidarity. You dodged this by dying, soft hair pressed to the pillow, now: the Worldwide Wrestling Regime. Like a cartoon dog hit on the head with a

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