FQ Columnist Amelie Hastie offers a unique and personal meditation on cinema's affective qualities, particularly the sentiment of love. She traces Cuarón's exploration of cinema's fundamental humanism back to Jean Renoir and continues through the Italian Neo-Realists, particularly Vittorio de Sica. She discusses Cuarón's intellectual formation as a student of cinema, and finds a consistent emphasis on women's experiences throughout his films. Introducing Cuarón's description of Roma as an “inquiry” into the relation between “foreground” and “background,” she delves into scenes where character and social environment converge.

The 1970s ushered in a new cinephilic culture for viewers. In reviewing the films of this era, columnist Amelie Hastie is struck by their resonance for our current political realities and concerns surrounding civil rights, governmental authority, and personal surveillance. To the author, revisiting or integrating the 1970s into contemporary film culture is a political act born out of resistance to both present-day politics and historical narratives. Through her discussion of films including Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman , Gordon Parks's The Learning Tree , Barbara Loden's Wanda , and Diane Kurys's Peppermint Soda , Hastie finds a welcome response to the current era of grotesque political nostalgia enamored with the “greatness” of oppression, including the slavery of African Americans, the internment of immigrants, and the stripping of women's power.

This entry of the “Vulnerable Spectator” column draws upon Jennifer Fox's autobiographical film The Tale (2018), which struggles with the filmmaker's memories of the 1970s, in order to reconsider the 1974 film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (dir. Martin Scorsese). Situating Alice within the history of women's contributions to US commercial film production and feminist film theory, Hastie argues both for a recognition of Ellen Burstyn's authorial role in regard to the film and for a more expansive theoretical and historiographic practice in relation to the era. This column kicks off a series of VS columns that will revisit U.S. films of the 1970s in order to understand their historical, theoretical, and contemporary relevance.

Amelie Hastie's column thinks through representations of the 1970s on film through an examination of two contemporary films: Battle of the Sexes (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2017) and The Center Will Not Hold (Griffin Dunne, 2017). She concludes that Somewhere between the jingle-jangle of nonsense and the sentimentality of a linear narrative lies the 1970s, the time of her childhood, the time to which she had never wanted to return but which she now finds herself trying to grasp, over and again. The films about and of this period implore her to continue.

Adapted from the Lissa Evans novel Their Finest Hour and a Half, Their Finest (Lone Scherfig, 2016) is a fictional film based loosely on historical figures and circumstances, as it tells the story of the production of a feature film by the UK Ministry of Information (MOI) in 1940. What, Their Finest quietly asks, is real? What is fake? And what does it matter, if you are at the movies? Joy is real. Tears are real. And other things, too: the tea I sip, the arm of my companion next to me, the chattering women in the row below, the sighing man who has come to the movies alone. The light is real. The darkness, too. Hastie thinks through the implications of a female author of the original monograph, the female director of the current film, and the fictional composite female character Catrin Cole, the screenwriter in the film. The whole of Catrin Cole did and didn't exist before Their Finest . “Catrin Cole” is not a historical figure, hidden or otherwise. She is a composite of fact and fiction, the pieces stitched together to make a whole person. As asserted by producer Stephen Woolley, who initiated the project, Their Finest drew upon the lives of many women writers for the Film Division of the MOI, particularly that of Diana Morgan, the one woman in the Ealing Studios writers’ room.

Drawing on the work of Virginia Woolf and Kristi McKim, FQ columnist Amelie Hastie explores how slow-moving films such as Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women have the possibility of affording time and, with it, restoring sensation to the audience.

FQ Columnist Amelie Hastie responds to Jacques Audiard's award-winning film Dheepan (2015), and acknowledges a long-standing attention to the filmmaker's work, stating: “Jacques Audiard's films move me. To screams, to tears, to fits of desire. I can remember every theatrical viewing of each of his films I have seen.” Hastie's column goes on to consider whether the films actively altered her own sense of perception, or whether her altered states determined her perception of Audiard's films. Engaging with the work of Henri Bergson, and exploring the themes of guardianship and traumatic fictions, Hastie delves into Audiard's logics vis-à-vis her own “matter and memory,” including an appreciation of her dog, Arlo.

FQ Columnist Amelie Hastie mixes autobiography and film analysis in her column on Creed (Ryan Coogler, 2015), reflecting on the physical acrobatics of the sport of boxing and the grand narrative gestures of the film. She also addresses her treatment for a brain tumor, which has compressed her left optic nerve. The tumor is constantly visible in her own line of sight, and everpresent with her at the movies. Boxing, like dancing and trains, is one of cinema's early objects of entrancement: in both cases, the audience is compelled to watch things move, whether giant industrial vehicles or bodies in all their parts.

FQ columnist Amelie Hastie revisits the life and work of André Bazin and asks: “What does it mean to have faith in the movies?” She concludes that Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin ( Nie Yinniang , 2015) has led her to think about such acts of faith in both her own response and the other responses that the film has evoked. Although The Assassin is a film that has bewildered its audiences—whether her students, or her friends, or a range of critics on the page and online—while watching the film, she found a renewed sense of faith in its images, and in the act of watching carefully.

Columnist Amelie Hastie reflects on her recent viewings of The Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller, 2015), and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, 2015) as filtered through the writings of André Bazin and her relationship to her nieces.

Regular FQ columnist Amelie Hastie reflects on her years of movie-going, waxing philosophical on her experiences as a naïve teenager in Portland, Oregon newly enchanted with cinema and relating those experiences to her sense of a doubled-self after a viewing of Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, 2014).

A study of Todd Haynes's HBO adaptation of James M. Cain's 1941 novel, Mildred Pierce , which emphasizes the way compassion for the central character is patiently built, and which argues for the relevance of feminist readings of the earlier 1945 film adaptation for this mini-series.