“You can’t just go home”: An Interview with Amanda Kernell

In the 1930s, indigenous children in Nordic countries were sent to boarding schools to “assimilate” into mainstream white culture. In Sweden, Sámi children left their families of reindeer herders to attend these schools for months at a time, forbidden from speaking their own languages and wearing their own clothes. Many students were subject to abuse […]

Killer Waves: Beach Girls and the Monster

In his review of Muscle Beach Party in the New York Times on May 28, 1964, Bosley Crowther, the granddaddy of mid-century film criticism, succinctly describes one of the central features of the new genre of “beach party film”: “a tangle of vigorous young people with beautiful bodies and empty heads.” In the era of […]