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Hallå! I'm Katie. I live in London (previously Stockholm), where I write lots of things.

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ELEPHANT •

Are They Play Fighting? Gundula Schulze Eldowy and Robert Frank at Akademie Der Künste

It’s always fascinating when we hear of two great artists coming together. Munch and Strindberg at the grand Cafe in Oslo, Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald tearing up Paris together, Cheever and Carver both drinking themselves to oblivion teaching in Idaho. Now, at Berlin’s Akademie Der Kunst until April, Keep a Stiff Upper Lip! is an exhibition on Gundula Schulze Eldowy and Robert Frank’s own kindred connection through their photography.


Walking into the exhibition, I have two thoughts: One
The Skinny •

All of Us Strangers review: a shattering look at loss and love: The Skinny

Adam (Andrew Scott) is a lonely screenwriter struggling to write about the parents he lost in a car accident when he was 12. He's also beginning a tender and sensual relationship with his puppyish and enigmatic neighbour, Harry (Paul Mescal), which develops against a backdrop of neon-lit dancefloors and dark nights in bed, the two like vampire lovers thirsty for connection. At the same time, Adam pays a visit to his childhood home and discovers his late parents living just as they were right bef
ELEPHANT •

This Artwork Changed My Life: A Nude Eve Babitz Taught Me to Be More Shameless

When Eve Babitz undressed to play chess with one of history’s greatest living artists, it was in a manner as effortless as her writing, her self-described “breezy landscapes” of hedonistic nights at the Chateau Marmont or the Polo Lounge. Julian Wasser’s 1963 photograph (Julian Wasser, Duchamp Playing Chess with a Nude (Eve Babitz)) and Babitz’s writing and tour de force personality permitted me to embrace both my bottomless appetite for pleasure and the urge to spill it all on the page.

“This
The Independent •

Sick of Myself is Norway’s must-see punk-horror-comedy

Our appetite for the anti-hero has always been an abiding feature of the cultural landscape. Think of Tony Soprano. Walter White. Even Joaquin Phoenix’s The Joker. All characters that we root for, despite the fact that their behaviour is often morally dubious at best, and downright sociopathic at worst.

The unlikable female character onscreen, meanwhile, is still viewed with an aura of revelation. The trend of finally allowing women to join the boys club of bad behaviour has led to the modern c
The Independent •

The pioneering Aids films that paved the way for It’s A Sin

A naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room” is how British filmmaker and gay activist Derek Jarman described his mind while his body was decaying from the effects of Aids. It’s a Sin, Russell T Davies’s latest series on Channel 4, keeps that light alive, celebrating the legacy of the people at the frontline of the Aids pandemic – the people who fought and died for the advancements we have today.

In the five-part drama, set between 1981 and 1991, HIV/Aids doesn’t reverberate openly – it is spe
The Independent •

Why Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza is an anti-love love story

Licorice Pizza is many things: a sun-soaked paean to 1970s LA; an earnest exploration of first love; a joyfully juvenile tribute to screwball cinema; a silly and voyeuristic behind-the-scenes slice of Tinseltown. But most of all, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film is a journey of the self, masquerading as a coming-of-age romance.

We open upon a meet-cute of the most unlikely kind: she’s the photographer’s assistant at his high school’s picture day. Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of the lat
NME •

How 'Promising Young Woman' uses fashion to take down societal sexism

There were many important films nominated at this year’s Oscars, but perhaps none has had a bigger impact than Promising Young Women. Mentioned in five categories (and winner of one) the film’s bold narrative and willingness to tackle difficult subjects like rape and sexual assault marked it out from the crowd. But what also made it so unique, and has been written about far less, was director Emerald Fennell’s ingenious use of fashion to enforce its message.

Pacy and gripping, the rape-revenge
Disability Arts Online •

Was Edvard Munch Agoraphobic?

In the first of a series of columns, Katie Driscoll reflects upon the painter Edvard Munch’s figurative works through the lens of Agoraphobia.

Edvard Munch: Norwegian, bohemian, expressionist, tortured artist. The Courtauld’s exhibition of Munch’s work, Masterpieces from Bergen, is installed in a room that’s more insular, smaller than the grander rooms that precede it. This, to me, makes sense. The dizzying grandeur of the rest of the museum would have frightened him to walk around. Was Munch A
Disability Arts Online •

The female problem: Looking at BPD through The Worst Person in the World and Girl, Interrupted

Katie Driscoll discusses Borderline Personality Disorder through two films, Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person In The World and James Mangold’s Girl Interrupted, in relation to media portrayals of the illness as a specifically female problem.

The NHS website defines BPD as a personality disorder “of mood and how a person interacts with others”, marked by emotional instability, disturbed thinking, impulsive behaviour and intensely unstable relationships with others. Unlike other mental health cond

Top of the Pops, nostalgia, and lockdown - The Skinny

There is too much rosé (the Graham Norton brand your mum likes, because all mums love Graham Norton). There is your mum crying while Elvis sways his hips on TV and your dad snoring upstairs, long gone to bed because he thinks you’re both acting too drunk and loutish, screaming at Elvis on the TV and talking about death. Mum cries around this point, because Elvis makes her think of her dead mother and that makes her think of her dead father.

And then there is Top of the Pops, and the stories I m
BFI •

Where to begin with Nina Menkes

Why this might not seem so easy

American independent filmmaker Nina Menkes has always operated outside of the mainstream. In her work as writer, editor and director, she’s cast her unique gaze on troubled souls, people at the forgotten fringes of society and the failed odysseys they undertake. Her experimental, low-budget films focus on the lived experience of women and the problematic dynamics of power that run their worlds.

So often in film history, men have had the honour of portraying drif
whynow •

The Greta Garbo of Pop | Kate Bush's classic film and literary influences

Kate Bush is a songwriter deserving of a renaissance. From The Shining to Ulysses, the English singer slipped in film and literary references throughout her career.

Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)’ from Hounds of Love is number one on the UK singles chart and padded shoulder suits are all the rage, but, no, it’s not 1985.

Just as a new generation of listeners were introduced to the wonders of Queen thanks to 1992’s Wayne’s World, Gen Z have been inaugurated into the mystic
whynow •

England Dreaming | The films that captured the true spirit of Punk

Before the subculture’s 21st century commodification, punk inspired many other art forms, not least film. From Derek Jarman to Julien Temple, punk lived authentically on screen as well as the stage.

K-Punk writer Mark Fisher once wrote that we are in the cultural era of “nostalgia mode”, doomed to recycle history while divorcing ourselves from the reality of that history.

That’s nowhere as true as with punk, a small yet era-defining moment in 1977 that sunk its claws into the collective cultur
STARBURST Magazine •

UNDER THE SILVER LAKE

As a cinephile, Sam (Garfield) should know better from watching enough Hitchcock films than to follow a beautiful ice cold blonde down into a rabbit hole mystery.

Like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo (he even has the binoculars), he’s trapped in a life he wants to escape (here, too much privilege, beauty, parties, and no work), albeit mentally not physically, and his escape is by watching. Sam is an entitled masculine jerk hiding underneath a good guy façade; one who effortlessly glides into parties,

You Scheming Bitch: Ratched through a humanist lens - The Skinny

With new Netflix series Ratched, the ever-prolific Ryan Murphy – along with newcomer Evan Romansky and Murphy's frequent collaborator Ian Brennan – enacts a world of institutional torture and medicinal control via septic green hospital wards and Douglas Sirkian melodrama. The show's eight hour-long episodes are an ode to cinema – complete with Bernard Herrmann’s Cape Fear score and De Palma’s use of split screens – but also to one of the most reviled villainesses in cinematic history: Nurse Ratc
STARBURST Magazine •

LORDS OF CHAOS

From the start, Lords of Chaos is not the hard hitting doc-style account of events that befell the Norwegian Black Metal scene, and Jonas Åkerlund’s opening that this is ‘based on truth, lies and what actually happened’, sets the tongue-in-cheek tone that is the film’s magic, which confirms it as a unique and precious encapsulation of an even more absurd story, and one that will prove infamous, having audience members thus far fainting and one seizure during its screenings.

Set in an Americanis
STARBURST Magazine •

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT

Lars Von Trier has coasted along as the enfant terrible of cinema for so long that now, finally, his use of shock tactics have lost their bite.

In The House That Jack Built, Matt Dillon’s Jack, seemingly in conversation throughout with an omnipresent male being, Verge, (Bruno Ganz playing either God or the Devil) reads like a straight, white man’s solipsistic manifesto on toxic masculinity as art in the age of #MeToo, but it’s also brimming with a playfulness that enlightens what is otherwise t
Disability Arts Online •

I'm Thinking of Ending Things – an original love-horror-treatise on mental illness

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is an American romance-horror-thriller, described as a ‘hot dose of mental illness horror’, both written and directed by Charlie Kaufman and released on Netflix on 4 September. Review by Katie Driscoll

Charlie Kaufman’s latest psychological drama delves into the mind of Iain Banks from his enigmatic book of the same name, where a maelstrom of internalised anxieties are externalised just as the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of a snow storm swirls around its central characters.
Disability Arts Online •

Cherry - a cinematic attempt to portray the impact of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Apocalypse Now showed the stifling oppression of war, how its devastating effects could wreak havoc on the psyche whilst in combat. Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket showed how the harsh regime of training could lead to a mental breakdown. One film, Jacob’s Ladder, provided an insight into PTSD and the aftereffects of war, once you’re home and everything is supposed to be over, except where it lingers in your mind. However, we now have this year’s Cherry (available to stream now on Apple TV+), wherein

Pretend It’s a City review: a symphony to New York - The Skinny

You’ll likely quiver with envy while watching Pretend It’s a City, Martin Scorsese’s new limited series on Netflix in which the filmmaker follows author and raconteur Fran Lebowitz around New York. The bohemian downtown artist life that it depicts is all but obliterated now, in an age of wellness and constant surveillance and social media influencers – topics Lebowitz takes to with the acerbic energy and fascinating aplomb, as she has done with any venture.

In this followup to 2010’s Public Spe

The Boys in the Band review: Netflix revival of classic - The Skinny

The world may be a completely different place to when Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band was first performed off-Broadway in 1968 (and filmed two years later by William Friedkin), but its dialogue still stings, and its spirit and lack of stereotyping make it feel as fresh as ever.

Producer Ryan Murphy and director Joe Mantello (who also helmed the 2018 stage version) bring together a lively cast featuring pretty much every young gay actor in Hollywood, and the venom flies. Zachary Quinto sizzl
STARBURST Magazine •

HALLOWEEN

Horror is a genre that repeats itself, in the mode of the folkloric traditions of storytelling that preceded it. This is proven in not only the longevity of Halloween but its central figures such as the final girl and the ability of its monster in the white mask to still scare audiences decades after his introduction.

David Gordon Green’s addition to the world of John Carpenter’s Halloween works both as a love letter to a film that has become even bigger than the horror genre itself – Michael M
STARBURST Magazine •

SUSPIRIA

If the original Suspiria is some Alice in Wonderland-esque dream, then Guadagnino’s Suspiria is the stark reality, set in a divided Berlin during the German Autumn that reverberates with the grief of its past, where trauma haunts citizens like a ghostly ectoplasm, where every corner the debris of repression is felt, a dilapidated prison, the same Berlin that possessed Adjani in Zulawski’s 1981 Possession, brutalist and controlled. Even in its form of six acts and an epilogue, its restraint a for

Love Bites: Making friends in new cities - The Skinny

She asked me if I was okay because I couldn’t stop laughing and I couldn’t stop laughing because I was happy. We laughed so much at that tiny corner table that we terrified the waiter. It was like we were speaking our own secret, female language.

The night ended giddily with Irish dancing through a square in Stockholm, white sleet trickling down. We were encased in our own bubble of laughter and silliness that felt timeless, like we were schoolgirls, all eager and ridiculous.

I always know if
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