Last spring, my last Riot Grrrl fantasy unceremoniously came and went. Third-wave feminist trailblazers Bikini Kill reunited to play a few shows in Los Angeles, New York and London—their first time playing together since I was three years old in 1997—and I couldn’t finagle my way into getting a single ticket. They sold out in literally one second, and the original $40-$50 ticket price was already a huge chunk of change for me, not considering that tickets were selling for quadruple times the face value on StubHub. Even after additional dates were added in order to combat the rush of […]

Sundance SCOTT MACAULAY Check it out: the two top prize winners at Sundance this year, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, both feature as central elements teenagers who stage and film their own versions of classic movies. There’s even overlap between the two films, although Moselle’s Manhattan shut-ins incline more towards Tarantino and Freddy Krueger, while Gomez-Rejon’s teen Pittsburgh auteurs shirk the Romero roots of their hometown for deep dives into the Criterion Collection. For film lovers of a certain age, both Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolfpack […]

Winner of a Special Jury Award for Directing at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival, Alex Sichel and Elizabeth Giamatti’s A Woman Like Me is a frankly disarming and emotionally piercing hybrid doc as well as a necessary directorial collaboration. Filmmaker Alex Sichel’s 1997 debut feature, All Over Me, was an important entry in the decade’s New Queer Cinema, a scrappy teen lesbian drama that, in the L.A. Weekly, critic Manohla Dargis wrote “comes closer to unlocking the secret lives of girls than any other recent American movie.” In the years following that film, Sichel taught directing at NYU, raised a […]