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
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
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
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
Twilight of the Satyrs 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
