FILMS from AFAR

Despite more than 50 books published in 40-plus languages, author Margaret Atwood may always be best known for her novel and hit series The Handmaid’s Tale, and now its sequel The Testaments. Both are set in a dystopian future society where women are forced to live under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship that denies them basic rights and freedoms. “Everything in The Handmaid's Tale has happened somewhere, sometime,” Atwood affirmed at a public appearance on Wednesday

Renowned restaurant owner and cook Nancy Silverton was recognized this summer with yet another major culinary award—the James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. Yet Silverton, co-owner of the Michelin-starred Mozza Restaurant Group, insists she doesn’t see herself as a chef. “That whole image of a chef is still somebody much grander than who I feel like,” she told Eater last year. We know where she gets that image. The culture loves the larger-than-life kitchen per

A woman translated it. A man filmed it. The culture war that followed says less about Homer than about who still gets to decide whose story counts. Emily Wilson, Nolan, and the Fight Over a Hero Why would a University of Pennsylvania classics professor need a dedicated “misogynistic trolling” button on her website? In Emily Wilson’s case, it’s because she dared translate Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, becoming the first woman to do so in English and helping inspire Christo

When Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, as the accidental outlaws Thelma and Louise, clutched each other’s hands and accelerated off a cliff 35 years ago, female audiences were stunned. We’d never seen such a fierce female friendship on screen. We finally had our Redford and Newman. We’d also never seen such a simmering condemnation of modern male chauvinism in a mainstream movie. It pushed these women over the edge. Thelma & Louise was heralded as a feminist film when it premi

The memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran has many, many fans, and they should be pleased by this faithful film adaptation. Staying very true to its source material, former English literature professor Azar Nafisi’s 2003 memoir about hosting a secret weekly book club with female students in post-revolutionary Iran, means the film can sometimes feel overly episodic, like chapters in a book rather than visual sequences in a narrative arc. But filmmaker Eran Riklis and team have succe

A book both beloved (over 100 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list) and banned (in Iran), Iranian author Azar Nafisi’s memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, was adapted to screen in 2023 by Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis based on a script he co-wrote with American Marjorie David. In 2024, it won the Audience Award and Special Jury Prize at the Rome Film Festival, the city where it was filmed. Reading Lolita in Tehran is set to premiere in the US on July 10 through Greenwich