So Many Things Have Vanished

Conor Williams sits down with film critic Melissa Anderson to discuss her recent essay collection.

By Conor WilliamsDecember 21, 2025

• Film

MELISSA ANDERSON and I are at Film Forum watching Le Tableau volé (2024), Pascal Bonitzer’s drama about the discovery of a lost painting by Egon Schiele. After a surprising lesbian kiss between Léa Drucker and Nora Hamzawi, Anderson leans over to me. “Movie of the year,” she whispers wryly.

In the 2010s, Anderson was the senior film critic for The Village Voice. There, she covered everything from retrospectives of cinema auteurs at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Lincoln Center to the latest Tyler Perry comedies. When she was younger, and living in Washington, DC, Anderson read film reviews in the Voice by J. Hoberman, Amy Taubin, and Gary Indiana, writers whose work showed her how to engage with cinema. Sitting down with me now at the Washington Square Diner, she laments the disappearance of the storied paper, and so many, many other cultural institutions—4Columns, a weekly online publication focused on cinema, literature, theater, and visual arts, will be ending its 10-year run in June 2026, and Anderson is the site’s film editor.

“So many things have vanished,” she says despondently, over the clanging of waiters moving silverware. “Artforum used to have really great film coverage, but since their disastrous decision in 2023, it’s been very hard to read,” she says, referring to the magazine’s firing of editor David Velasco over a letter supporting Palestinians after October 7. “Cinema Scope has folded,” Anderson notes, and so much of the industry “has been absolutely decimated. I know I’m not impartial, but I think what we’ve been able to do with 4Columns is very admirable. I am very fortunate that nearly all my favorite film critics write for 4Columns. Outside of film, I devour every issue of Bookforum.”

While Bookforum closed in 2022, it has since been rejuvenated and brought back to life. Still, that rescue mission was a rare bright spot in an incredibly precarious time for journalism, for criticism, and for critical thinking. Paste has done away with everything but their music criticism. Filmmaker is now going to be headed by the former digital director of Vanity Fair, who will redesign their brand and push for more digital content. Most disturbingly, the obsolete website for The Village Voice for some reason has a drop-down menu that links to AI porn. I wish I was kidding.

Amid all this bullshit, Anderson has long been a beacon of light for readers looking for astute judgment. Her criticism has a wonderful and lively clarity, and for a rightfully esteemed intellectual, she has a real sense of humor. With The Hunger: Film Writing, 2012–2024 (Film Desk Books, 2025), Anderson has compiled her work, previously published in 4Columns, The Village Voice, and Artforum, under headings including “The Homosexual Agenda and Trans Missions” and “Cinema, Industrial-Size and Smaller (with a focus on heterosexual depravity).”

Anderson and I were introduced to each other by Ed Halter in the late 2010s, when she visited the Film at Lincoln Center’s Critics Academy program, led by director and critic Michael Koresky. “One doesn't realize just how short in supply genuine honesty is in criticism until one reads Melissa Anderson,” Koresky writes me in an email. “Melissa was mercilessly diagnosing the heteronormativity of our film culture well before it was in fashion, and still manages to leave her many queer acolytes in the dust.”

Following the release of Anderson’s 2021 monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), I attended her lecture on the actress Laura Dern at the Brooklyn microcinema Light Industry. This lecture was an expansion on her book, in which she used critic Dave Kehr’s concept of the “acteur” to describe the magic of the performer’s work:

It is all about focusing on a particular performer, seeing the actor as just as valid an authorial presence as the director. I remember reading that term—I thought, This is an entry point into cinema. When I’m writing about cinema, I’m often focusing on the performers. It was indispensable when I was writing that monograph on Inland Empire. It’s such an utterly confounding and yet transporting film that the best way for me to make sense of it was to focus on Laura Dern and how her longtime collaboration with Lynch informs what she’s doing.

The fact that Anderson can extract such sense out of what is, arguably, David Lynch’s most opaque work is impressive on its own, but what makes that book all the more stupendous is that she is able to articulate it all so beautifully. “Inland Empire mesmerizes,” she writes,

its pull resulting from the thrills of watching a well-known performer, one long affiliated with this particular director, transform, stretch herself into terrified, terrifying characters. Dern’s long, Modigliani-like face has never been more elastic; her mouth becomes a maw, a portal to an annihilating abyss.

A few pages later, Anderson introduces the acteur idea that will anchor the book’s argument:

Dern—whose gestures, reactions and movements, always pinpoint precise in their immensity, make this bewildering project indelible and even at times lucid—might be thought of as just as much of a creator as Lynch. […] [Her] terrifying grimace is the movie’s signature. Her stretchy body tautens Inland Empire’s viscous, malefic expanse.

The Hunger features several essays on other acteurs. While many critics and moviegoers still chain Kristen Stewart to her performance in the Twilight series (2008–12), stupidly claiming that she lacks any noticeable screen presence, Anderson advocates for the actress: “[Her] recent roles confirm what’s been evident all along: that she is one of her generation’s most quicksilver performers […] this electrifying mutability is rooted in her genius at communicating, both onscreen and off-, a sexuality that is itself ever-changing.” Of Shelley Duvall, and her brief appearance in Annie Hall (1977), Anderson writes: “Duvall, in the meager screen time allotted her, proves the sole source of buoyancy in a project overpopulated by smug, charmless neurotics, its director-cowriter-star chief among them.” Given that Anderson is an ardent feminist, I’m not surprised that nearly all of her picks for performers to focus on are female—Adèle Haenel, Lily Tomlin, Cate Blanchett—though I am intrigued by her inclusion of David Bowie.

“He was one of the first people I ever saw in concert, at the Hersheypark Arena,” Anderson tells me proudly. “My Bowie fandom dates to my pubescence. I’ve always been fascinated by his shape-shifting, his queerness, the way he queers his roles. I think the occasion for that piece was a retrospective at Lincoln Center in 2013 of his film roles. It included some pretty deep cuts, like this fascinating documentary that ran on the BBC called Cracked Actor (1975), which was filmed during his 1974 Thin White Duke era, where he’s so cadaverous because he’s so deep into his cocaine addiction.”

In the book’s introduction, Anderson notes that Ed Halter suggested the title. “The Hunger, of course, is the name of Tony Scott’s stylish, ludicrous ode to bi-curiosity from 1983, starring Catherine Deneuve as a soignée vampiress who seduces Susan Sarandon.” “I’m still puzzled,” she writes, “as to why I didn’t somehow manage to see the film in ’83, the year that my ardor for David Bowie, another of the movie’s stars, peaked. Was the explicitly sapphic plotline simply too terrifying to my proto-lesbo adolescent self?”

In The Hunger, Anderson covers steamy and heart-wrenching films, often about women who love women, like Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is The Warmest Color (2013) and Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015). Writing on Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), she admits a tongue-in-cheek gripe with its title, which suggests a relationship between women, while “the most infamous scene […] features Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, both nude and sweat-slicked, their dongs jouncing, wrestling in front of a roaring fire.” One of the most biting negative takes in the book comes in response to Roland Emmerich’s sanitized and whitewashed Stonewall (2015). Anderson calls it “a ghastly project that places a lily-white muscle twink from Indiana as the tour guide for that pivotal event, with various trans characters and street queens of color assuming secondary roles and providing emotional succor to the Aryan beauty.”

Sitting across from me in the diner booth, Anderson mourns the loss of another pop culture genre: the erotic thriller. The film that most closely approximates this mode in The Hunger would have to be Fifty Shades of Grey (2019), the S–M smut adaptation that made Dakota Johnson a star. This is where the heterosexual depravity comes in, although there’s not much actual depravity to be found in the film itself. “Rapid edits during the sex scenes—whether vanilla or those involving spanking, blindfolds, restraints, etc.—fragment the body,” Anderson notes, adding, “If Fifty Shades of Grey the movie has anything to teach us, it’s that today’s MPAA appears to be reverting not just to the Hays Code but to the Old Covenant.”

“The decrease of sex, any kind of sex, even depraved heterosexual sex […] this is very grim,” Anderson admits in the diner. “I attribute this to studios being extremely cautious, not wanting there to be even the remotest chance that someone could be ‘offended,’ and to filmmakers—or not necessarily filmmakers but big studios—not being very good at making films for adults.”

She adds, “There are still some very great, very sexy movies. For example, Last Summer.” The most recent film from controversial French filmmaker and novelist Catherine Breillat, written in collaboration with Pascal Bonitzer, Last Summer (2023) stars the aforementioned Drucker as a lawyer who develops a sexual relationship with her own stepson.

I ask Anderson if she’s learned anything about her own work in putting her book together. The pieces in The Hunger span years and various publications. Is there something that makes itself visible to Anderson when everything is put in this very order?

“Well, I’ve been writing about film now for a quarter of a century,” she tells me. “The first test was trying to figure out how far back I wanted to go. I guess what was really shocking was how many films I’ve written about […] that I have no memory of. That really shook me up. When you’re a freelancer, you often say yes to just about anything. So, in my years, particularly between 2000 and 2005, I was often writing about films that played [and] I would go see these films and pay very close attention to them and take dutiful notes and then file my 150–200-word review. So, it makes sense to me that these films quickly vanished. One was reminded of how many films, presumably, even the filmmaker doesn’t remember. I may have grumbled about it at the time, but all of it, every film I wrote about, no matter how bad, it was all a good exercise.”

A quarter of a century into a career in film criticism, Melissa Anderson remains gratefully indebted to cinema—the good, bad, and even the forgettable. With The Hunger, Anderson has provided her devoted readers with a brilliant collection of some of her finest work. And who knows? There may be a young, queer, blossoming cinephile out there who happens across this book, waiting to be welcomed into the ever-transforming, and ever-transformative, world of film.