"I don't walk out of movies often -- the last, I think, was Labor Day, and before that, The East -- and never when I'm writing a review, though some movies might have been better off had I been set free earlier from their toxic embrace. Historically, I've been an "in for a penny, in for a pound" type, partly out of a sense of duty, partly because as a critic, you're always waiting for the moment when a movie perfectly encapsulates its own worth or lack thereof, and you never know when that crucial piece of evidence may surface. But when I'm watching movies to see if they're worth writing about, I'm trying to hew more closely to the New York Times' theater critic Walter Kerr's famous dictum: "You don't have to eat the whole apple to know it's rotten."
“I need him like the axe needs the turkey.” This is Barbara Stanwyck’s spurned card sharp in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve (1941), speaking of a man she loves, and loves to hate. Such a bloodthirsty sentiment is typical of “Vengeance is Hers,” BAMcinématek’s twenty-film program that highlights a particular aspect of female desire—the desire for revenge. Stanwyck’s target, a socially incompetent ophiologist (Henry Fonda) who has thrown her over, gets off relatively easy: She marries the dunce. We may chalk up this light sentence to the fact that The Lady Eve is a Valentine’s Day screening, for most of the (overwhelmingly male) targets in the series aren’t so lucky. They will die slowly, screaming, by tooth and claw, by sword and poison and aphrodisiac overdose, by fire and firearm and scissors."
"New York Times editorial department passed on Dylan Farrow's open letter to Woody Allen." Self explanatory. By Dylan Byers, for his Politico column On Media. (It actually was not an open letter to Woody Allen, but whatever.)
Video essay by Nelson Carvajal on women in Martin Scorsese's movies. To read an accompanying piece by Max Winter, click here.
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.