North, South, and Across the Pond

This is the 21st edition of Thelma & Alice, the newsletter for people who want to watch more movies made by women. A big THANK YOU to my new subscribers and paid subscriptions! You are the best, and I am working on my first bonus post, which will be about all the movies I watched this year that I chose not to recommend for this newsletter. There is one movie in particular that everyone else seems to love and I just . . . wasn’t feeling it. If that sounds like something you’d like to read, you can subscribe or upgrade to paid right here ⤵️

In addition to the recommendations below, one of the movies I wrote about over the summer, FIRE OF LOVE, is now available on Disney+. The volcano footage in this documentary is stunning, trippy, and truly awesome, in the spiritual sense of the word. (My full review at The Common.) If you’re a Disney subsriber, it’s worth checking out. I plan to show it to my son.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to reach out with suggestions & comments. You can reply directly to this email or write in the comments.

Portrait of a Young Photographer

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987)
Directed by Patricia Rozema
1 hour 21 minutes; Streaming on Kanopy and Criterion

I watched this oddball movie on a whim and I think that was the best state of mind to encounter it. Set in Toronto in the mid-1980s, it’s narrated by a dreamy and naive woman, Polly, who is too flighty for the working world. She picks up temporary jobs here and there, but her real passion is photography. Polly’s artistic ambitions are clarified when she takes a job working for a glamorous French-Canadian curator who embodies elegance and good taste. When Polly becomes overly entangled in her boss’s life, hijinks ensue and Polly realizes the curator isn’t quite what she seems. This is a film that is remarkably free of angst, even as it contemplates questions like “What is art?” and “Who counts as an artist?” IMDB * REVIEW * TRAILER

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story

Descendant (2022)
Directed by Margaret Brown
1 hour 49 minutes; Streaming on Netflix

I thought a lot about who gets to write history as I watched this documentary about the legacy of the Clotilda, a slave ship that was burned and sunk in swampland near Mobile, Alabama. The ship was burned because it was a crime scene; it arrived in Mobile in 1860, after slavery had been banned in the United States. The family that burned the ship never spoke of it again; the African men and women who survived the months-long journey from the coast of Africa to the coast of North America passed the story down through the generations. In 1927, a young writer and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston, took down the oral history of the last living captive of that ship, Cudjo Lewis. She tried to publish it, but her editors did not appreciate that it was in dialect, and the book, Barracoon, was not published until 2018, nearly 60 years after Hurston’s death. I’m getting off track with this summary, but this layered, thoughtful documentary has a lot in it. It’s about community organizing, zoning laws, local government, environmental justice, tourism, and reparations. More than anything, it’s about history, and who benefits from the narratives that become mainstream.  IMDB * REVIEW * TRAILER

That Was Absurd, Let’s Eat Dead Bird

Home for the Holidays (1998)
Directed by Holly Hunter
Written by Chris Radant and W.D. Richter
1 hours 43 minutes; VOD $2.99

Why Nancy Meyers never made a Thanksgiving movie is a mystery to me, but it’s okay, because we have Holly Hunter’s modern classic, Home for the Holidays, which stars Hunter as Claudia Larson, a woman who has just been fired mid-career and must return home to Baltimore in the midst of her humiliation. The supporting cast includes Robert Downey Jr. at his 90s Peak, Anne Bancroft who is always Peak, no matter what decade, Charles Durning, Dylan McDermott, and a very young Claire Danes. This is a dysfunctional family drama, but not in a dark way–there are no terrible secrets to unearth. This is simply a family where people love each other but don’t always like each other. My favorite thing about this film is the set design. The Larson family house is cluttered and cozy and looks like it's been lived in for decades. It’s the kind of house that comforts and annoys in equal measure, bringing out your inner teenager. It’s the kind of house you’d never, ever see in a Nancy Meyers movie. IMDB * REVIEW * TRAILER

Family Movie Night: Little Kid Edition

The Secret Garden (1993)
Directed by Agnieska Holland
Written by Caroline Thompson, based on the book by Frances Hodgson Burnett
1 hour 41 minutes; Streaming HBO 

Close readers of this substack will know I have become an Agnieska Holland superfan. Her movies are not flashy, but they are idiosyncratic and well-made, and there is always a strong emotional core. Her version of The Secret Garden is G-rated and sincere in a way that appeals to younger children. My 5 year-old-daughter liked it a lot better than my 10-year-old son. In fact, she liked it a lot more than most kids' movies and connected with it immediately. Holland keeps the story moving quickly and isn’t sentimental about the child characters, or the adults. The garden scenes were fantastical, in a good way, with woodland creatures and endless roses. IMDB * REVIEW * TRAILER