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Articles by Laura Kenna
Charles Dickens Still Haunts Christmas
At 31 years old, Charles Dickens was already a novelist of international renown. He’d also hit upon a career slump—a string of three commercial flops—and needed to deliver a hit to escape mounting financial pressures. In the winter of 1843, the author struck on the idea of a Christmas ghost story that would be released in time for the holiday.
The Moral Truths of ‘Suburbicon’
The film Suburbicon begins with a shot of an opening storybook, a convention used at the start of classic fairytale films like Snow White and Cinderella. The kings of these castles, however, are mid-20th century, middle-aged white guys, and their kingdom is a splendorous landscape of freshly mowed lawns, freshly built homes, and freshly waxed sedans sitting in driveways.
'Atomic Blonde' Delivers Female Action Without An Action Hero
Many moviegoers turn to the absurdities of comedy or the happy endings of romance when looking for an escape. I’m more of a guns and explosions kind of girl, so I’d been looking forward to Atomic Blonde, the Cold War espionage thriller starring Charlize Theron as MI6 operative Lorraine Broughton. Atomic Blonde is a highly stylized, spy-versus-spy picture based on a graphic novel.
‘The Beguiled’ Reveals the Cracks in Our Imagined Selves
The year is 1864. Somewhere in Virginia, a young girl walks through the woods, singing herself a sweetly imperfect melody. Viewers watch from behind as her small figure, head and shoulders framed by long brunette braids, bends, then bends again to collect mushrooms from the forest floor. The camera pans upward revealing tree branches arching and entwined, the vaults of a natural cathedral illuminated by the pale, even light of dusk. The girl walks unhurried down its aisle.
The Crown: Balancing Family and Calling Is a Royal Pain
I recall sitting with my mother in my childhood living room and watching Diana Spencer—about to be Princess Diana—walk slowly down the aisle toward the altar and her prince. The year was 1981, and despite my tender age, the princess fantasy did not take hold. Nor did I become a “royals watcher”… at least not until Netflix released its Queen Elizabeth II bio series, The Crown, earlier this month. Why the change of heart?
‘Big Little Lies’ Tells the Truth
Big Little Lies is a lot of things: an adaptation of one of Oprah’s favorite beach novels, a miniseries produced by its stars Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, an excuse for innumerable shots of the coastline near Big Sur, a murder mystery unfolding in flashback, a satire of the privileged class and helicopter parenting, a melodrama about midlife crises, and a meta-commentary on how Hollywood’s female roles are comparatively less complex than the series’ characters.
Farewell to TV's Most Powerful Single Ladies
Female television fans are saying some hard goodbyes this month. Two weeks ago television icon Mary Tyler Moore passed away at age 80. This Sunday, Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls will debut the first episode of its final season. Separated as they were by years and their approaches to, well, just about everything, it is easier to imagine these two actresses as poles on a spectrum from “purposefully disturbing” to “calculatingly genial” rather than as co-laborers for a common cause.
How to Get Our Girls Into Scripture
Quarantined during a 72-hour radioactive iodine treatment, Erin Weidemann had what she calls “a dark moment of the soul.” Hours before, she had swallowed a pill that doctors hoped would kill the aggressive cancer metastasizing in her chest and head. At 26, she faced the reality of her own mortality. “My battle with cancer was a five-year period where I was discovering a closeness with the Lord,” says Weidemann.
When Women Blame Men for Domestic Stress, They Miss the Big Picture
TIME recently published a piece on housework and parenting asserting that until men share the “invisible workload that drags women down,” women will never be free.
‘The Good Place’ Imagines an Eternity of Ethics Lessons
From time to time, popular culture weighs in with advice about the afterlife. “You can’t take it with you,” admonishes the Pulitzer Prize–winning play by the same title. A popular ’50s polka warns that “in heaven there is no beer.” According to NBC’s The Good Place there is, however, a copious amount of frozen yogurt.
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