Email Author Jessica Winter

2005 Stories by Jessica Winter

• Amber Alert

  published December 27, 2005

  The galvanizing force in Ali Smith's latest novel is the mysterious stranger on the doorstep who rearranges a family's psychic furniture, takes a... More >>

• Sex and the Single Squaw

  published December 13, 2005

  Terrence Malick's The New World is an anxious object, a $30 million art movie about the much disputed and misappropriated tale of John... More >>

• Famous Wit and Manwhore Disneyfied as Closet Monogamist

  published December 13, 2005

  "He's a sperm-filled waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator," declared Fellini by way of explaining his choice of Donald Sutherland to play the... More >>

• Claire Denis's Change of Heart

  published December 13, 2005

  A fragmentary and elusive cine-poem, Claire Denis's The Intruder derives from a surprisingly matter-of-fact source. "The idea for the film... More >>

• The Scripting News

  published November 22, 2005

  "It was marvelous, huge. I'm not sure I can put into words the sensation of seeing something you've written years ago rear up in monstrous... More >>

• Change Clothes

  published November 15, 2005

  As the high-altitude freelance terrorist in Red Eye and the man in the maggot-eaten burlap sack in Batman Begins, Cillian Murphy... More >>

• Faking the Waves

  published November 8, 2005

  Winner of this year's Man Booker prize, The Sea is "possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible... More >>

• The Aristocrats

  published November 1, 2005

  When last we met Patrick Melrose, whose miserable childhood and death-defying twenties drug hell were chronicled with coruscating precision in... More >>

• Spirit of the Beehive

  published November 1, 2005

  Tepid literary adaptations are a dime a remainder pile, but even someone unacquainted with Myla Goldberg's much admired 2000 novel Bee... More >>

• 'Pride & Prejudice'

  published November 1, 2005

  This handsome rendition of Jane Austen's beloved marriage comedy is a somewhat quixotic undertaking given the hugely successful BBC production of... More >>

• 'Shopgirl'

  published October 11, 2005

  The movie version of Steve Martin's slim first fiction is an uneasy marriage of form and content—a wan, world-weary representation of anomie,... More >>

• Classless Class Action Flick Guilty of Viewer Harassment

  published October 11, 2005

  The lead plaintiff in Jenson v. Eveleth Mines, the first class action sexual-harassment suit, began work at the northern Minnesota... More >>

• Scrutiny on the Bounty: Scott's Chopped-Up, Moronic Romp

  published October 4, 2005

  Domino only wants to give you everything. Freeze-frames, blurred or stuttering slo-mo, fast-forwards, filters, strobe flickers, 360-degree... More >>

• Arrested Development

  published September 20, 2005

  TORONTO—"In a way, I feel protected by the movie," says writer-director Noah Baumbach, who based his plangent, painfully funny The... More >>

• Polanski's 'Twist' on a Classic Is the Stuff of Nightmares

  published September 13, 2005

  Early in the new rendition of Charles Dickens's novel of social injustice, a camera shot briefly holds the friendless orphan between the bars of... More >>

• Surprise: Film with Von Trier Screenplay Satirizes American Idiocy

  published September 13, 2005

  Yet more buckshot and spleen launched in America's general direction, Lars von Trier's screenplay for Dear Wendy marks the latest volume... More >>

• War and Fleece: Niccol-Plated Gun Runner Satire Shoots Blanks

  published September 6, 2005

  Let no one say that Lord of War lacks for auteurist aspiration. In the opening-title sequence, set to the strains of Buffalo Springfield's... More >>

• American Brooding

  published September 6, 2005

  Emo cinema adds another quirky, wistful member to its ranks with Thumbsucker, whose young suburbanite hero fits the type of... More >>

• 'Keane' Star Researches Role Among the Mentally Ill

  published August 30, 2005

  In Lodge Kerrigan’s riveting Keane (opening September 9), Damian Lewis occupies nearly every frame as the schizophrenic title... More >>

• The Good Seed

  published August 9, 2005

  Ralph Fiennes looks and sounds like the Anglophile's wildest fantasy of the smooth and smoldering British leading man. A well-wrought crucible of... More >>

• The Opposite of Sex

  published August 9, 2005

  With the same demographic savvy of Wedding Crashers, The 40-Year-Old Virgin melds frat-house sex comedy with dewy romantic... More >>

• Desperate Housewife: Randy Depressive Lost in Enervating Fog

  published August 2, 2005

  The terrifying paralysis of clinical depression has inspired a trove of bracing memoirs but has yet to produce its definitive movie—the... More >>

• 'The Skeleton Key'

  published August 2, 2005

  The haunted-house frightener has traditionally depended on the impaired IQ of both its characters and viewers, and The Skeleton Key's... More >>

• The Life Quixotic

  published July 26, 2005

  Lanky maestros of minimalist deadpan, Jim Jarmusch and Bill Murray somehow never got together until 2003's Coffee and Cigarettes, wherein... More >>

• Pumpkinheads and Spud-Spawn in Bender's New Fictions

  published July 26, 2005

  Aimee Bender's bracing first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own, spent an anxious, mordant season with an OCD-afflicted math teacher who's... More >>