Melissa Anderson, Village Voice

Melissa Anderson

Village Voice

New York, NY, United States

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Recent:
  • Unknown
Past:
  • Village Voice

Past articles by Melissa:

Metrograph Celebrates “The Lost Moment” — And Other Nearly Lost Moments

In her introduction to A Year in the Dark: Journal of a Film Critic, 1968–69, a collection of her reviews from her fourteen-month stint as... → Read More

The Teri Show: BAM Celebrates a Kicky, Kinetic Performer

In one of her first onscreen appearances, Teri Garr’s name appears nowhere in the credits, but you can’t miss her. With a sweatshirt emblazoned with... → Read More

“Prick Up Your Ears” Smartly Depicts a Complex Gay Life

Thirty years ago, the lives of gay luminaries were rarely the subject of feature films. Among the first of the LGBT biopics, Stephen Frears’s astute... → Read More

Eliza Hittman Probes Turbulent Desire in Coastal Brooklyn in the Evocative “Beach Rats”

With just two features to date, Eliza Hittman has emerged as the finest chronicler of sexual awakening in deepest Brooklyn. In her first film, 2013’s... → Read More

Bertrand Bonello Takes on Teen Terrorism in the Hypnotizing, Estranging “Nocturama”

Often populated with voluptuaries, the films of Bertrand Bonello unerringly distill mood and milieu. In his heady, sinuous biopic Saint Laurent (2014), for example, Bonello... → Read More

Geography Lessons and Grindr Make for a Lovely ‘4 Days in France’

A pleasingly discursive road movie for our geosocial age, writer-director Jérôme Reybaud’s debut narrative feature navigates la France profonde with the help of Grindr.... → Read More

With the Expansive ” ’77,” the Film Society Takes the Measure of a Brilliant Year in Movies

Sometimes the best counterprogramming happens forty years after the fact. The Film Society’s genre-spanning, globetrotting (though mostly Anglophone) series “ ’77” surveys the cinema that... → Read More

Going Coastal: Revisiting the Seventies SoCal of Eve Babitz’s “Sex and Rage”

Native Angeleno and besotted partisan of her hometown, the writer and polymath of pleasure Eve Babitz has often been defined by what she isn’t. She... → Read More

Parsing Uncommon Knowledge in Godard’s “Le Gai Savoir”

Jean-Luc Godard’s last completed film to date, from 2014, is called Goodbye to Language. But he began issuing his farewell forty-plus years earlier. The rarely... → Read More

Sisterhood Is Powerful — and Pugnacious — in “Girls Trip”

Truth in advertising: Girls trip hard during their New Orleans getaway in Girls Trip, which maybe doesn’t need that possessive apostrophe after all. Malcolm D.... → Read More

Yvonne Rainer, Anti-Drama Queen

In the heady, inventive cinema of Yvonne Rainer, melodrama isn’t just mined but stripped bare → Read More

Why Are All The Lesbian Bars Disappearing?

It was a French gay male neurasthenic, nearly a century ago, who perhaps best expressed the particular paradox of lesbian recognition: “The daughters of Gomorrah... → Read More

Flying High on João Pedro Rodrigues’s X-rated Impieties

The director's latest soars with shape-shifting delights → Read More

Binary Decoded: Nonconforming Genders At Anthology & The Quad

This week, a repertory series at Anthology and a newly restored rarity from 1969 at the Quad demonstrate, long before it was fashionable to do... → Read More

Marlene Dietrich Doesn’t Appear In Her Own Documentary — But Her Rage Does

In a fascinating Dietrich documentary, the star explodes → Read More

Despite Some Appealing Misandry, Wonder Woman Can’t Avoid A Mansplaining

Wonder Woman emerges to save the world but risks losing herself → Read More

Tracing The Distraught DNA Of Twin Peaks’ Dead Heroine

The tagline for David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), which he has avowed is his final feature-length film, is a four-word fragment: “a woman in trouble.”... → Read More

The Vast Days of Disco: "Saturday Night Fever" and the Politics of Dancing

Disco isn't dead and never has been — not even the mass psychosis evinced during the grotesque spectacle known as "Disco Demolition Night," held in... → Read More

"The Lovers," Azazel Jacobs's Latest, Plumbs the Mysteries of Matrimony

A comedy, and also a tragedy, of remarriage — without couples counseling or divorce — writer-director Azazel Jacobs's The Lovers revitalizes its genre with a piquant premise: What happens when long-wedded spouses, each with a romantic partner outside their dormant dyad, find the spark reignited — a combustion that results... → Read More

The Quad Commemorates Itself and Spoils Us With Rediscoveries

When the Quad reopened on April 14, it semi-scandalously kicked off its repertory programming with the films of Lina Wertmüller, who indisputably ranks... → Read More