Charlotte Allen

Charlotte Allen has a PhD in medieval studies from the Catholic University of America. She has written frequently for the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and First Things.

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18 Posts

Denzel Washington in Roman costume. He is a middle-aged black man with close cropped hair wearing robes and jewelle

Games and Thrones

The real history of the era portrayed in Gladiator II is much more interesting, tumultuous, and murderous than Scott’s simpleminded yarn.

Charlotte Allen

4 Dec 2024 · 13 min read

A woman in a yellow coat stands in front of a row of lockers. She is attractive, fifties, carries an expensive handbag.

All Hail the New Flesh

For all its decorative asides about predatory male sexuality, ‘The Substance’ is most coherently understood as a morality tale about the folly of feminist illusions.

Charlotte Allen

1 Nov 2024 · 11 min read

Blonde on Blonde

Andrew Dominik’s much-maligned film about the life and death of a screen icon claws through the sentimental myth-making in search of terrible truths.

Charlotte Allen

18 Oct 2024 · 32 min read

France’s Founding Fathers: A Review of ‘House of Lilies’

In a new book, Justine Firnhaber-Baker tells the story of the Capetian dynasty (987–1328), whose rulers stitched a set of medieval duchies and counties into a single kingdom.

Charlotte Allen

26 Jun 2024 · 20 min read

A still of Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Pierre Leaud in Le Chinoise. They are sitting at a table reading and smoking cigarettes.

Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part II: Fanaticism and Failure (1966–2022)

After half a decade of critical adulation, Godard’s career slumped into doctrinaire Maoism, bitterness, incomprehensibility, and irrelevance. It never recovered.

Charlotte Allen

16 Apr 2024 · 36 min read

A woman and two men, snapping their fingers. Image from Band à Part (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)

Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part I: Abstraction Hero (1930–65)

A brief five-year period produced nearly all the Godard movies that film aficionados still remember, but even these celebrated works have dated poorly.

Charlotte Allen

10 Apr 2024 · 33 min read

Chaucer’s Bawdy Broad

More than six centuries after The Canterbury Tales first appeared, the Wife of Bath still has lessons to teach about love, sex, marriage, and—yes—feminism

Charlotte Allen

20 Jun 2023 · 24 min read

Scenes from a Marriage

In 2020, a British High Court judge ruled that actor Johnny Depp was probably a “wife beater.” Earlier this year, an American jury disagreed. Who got it right?

Charlotte Allen

18 Jan 2023 · 70 min read

Didion in El Salvador

While Joan Didion felt compelled to write about Latin American culture and politics because everyone else was doing it, she didn’t understand them very well.

Charlotte Allen

11 Feb 2022 · 17 min read

Brutal and Unreformed

Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Straw Dogs’ at 50.

Charlotte Allen

15 Dec 2021 · 33 min read

I. On April 18th of this year, Blake Bailey, 58, the author of Philip Roth: The Biography, was abruptly dropped by his literary agency, the Story Company. His book had been published on April 6th, and climbed to the top of the bestseller lists. But then allegations emerged that while

Charlotte Allen

11 Aug 2021 · 28 min read

Mailer and the Second Wavers

“The Prisoner of Sex”—in both magazine and book form—was largely a baroque riposte to Kate Millett’s bestselling feminist polemic Sexual Politics.

Charlotte Allen

22 Mar 2021 · 31 min read

Requiem for a Female Serial Killer—A Review

Wuornos had maintained that all seven victims had become violent and either raped or threatened to rape her, and that she had killed them in self-defense.

Charlotte Allen

8 Dec 2020 · 20 min read

Deception and Complicity—the Strange Case of Jessica Krug

But the real scandal—not discussed much in the media—wasn’t Krug’s decade of duplicity.

Charlotte Allen

25 Sep 2020 · 9 min read

Flannery O'Connor and the Ideological War on Literature

What cancel culture has just mown down isn’t simply Flannery O’Connor or her works, but our ability to view them through any other lens except that of doctrine.

Charlotte Allen

17 Aug 2020 · 13 min read

Charlotte Allen

Games and Thrones

All Hail the New Flesh

Blonde on Blonde

France’s Founding Fathers: A Review of ‘House of Lilies’

Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part II: Fanaticism and Failure (1966–2022)

Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part I: Abstraction Hero (1930–65)

Chaucer’s Bawdy Broad

Scenes from a Marriage

Didion in El Salvador

Brutal and Unreformed

Twilight of the Satyrs

Mailer and the Second Wavers

Requiem for a Female Serial Killer—A Review

Deception and Complicity—the Strange Case of Jessica Krug

Flannery O'Connor and the Ideological War on Literature