The Cinema of Female Desire
The DailyYou’re reading The New Yorker’s daily newsletter, a guide to our top stories, featuring exclusive insights from our writers and editors. Sign up to receive it in your in-box.In today’s newsletter, an out-of-style genre makes a comeback, and then:The acquittal of Daniel PennyMichael Schulman on the best performances of 2024Rashid Johnson’s metamorphosisReijn says that she watched “9½ Weeks” “like, six thousand times,” beginning in her late teens. But, she notes, steamy films of the nineteen-eighties and nineties had “a lot of sexism in them.”Photograph by Katie McCurdy for The New YorkerA Feminist Director Takes On the Erotic ThrillerHalina Reijn has always loved the genre—and revelled in creating a steamy melodrama for Nicole Kidman in which the protagonist is “greedy,” “dark,” and “wrong.”The final day of shooting for “Babygirl,” a new erotic thriller, was devoted to a sequence that the film’s writer and director, Halina Reijn, had deliberately saved for last. In the movie, which will be released on Christmas, Nicole Kidman plays Romy, the hyper-competent C.E.O. of a robotics company, who feigns pleasure in her marriage and flirts perilously with a younger man at work until he tempts her into a kinky affair. In this scene, Romy and her paramour, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), were alone in a cheap hotel room in Manhattan, attempting to define their new dynamic. The environs were unsavory—Reijn had chosen blood-red curtains and carpeting specifically to evoke a womb—but there was a charge in the air. The end of the encounter would be the literal consummation of the couple’s mind games: Romy would orgasm. Keep reading, or listen to the story »The LedePhotograph by Yuki Iwamura / APHow Daniel Penny Was Found Not Guilty in a Subway Killing That Divided New YorkThe trial over the death of Jordan Neely—which made Daniel Penny, the man who choked him, a right-wing cause célèbre—became a flash point in the debate over crime and vigilantism in big cities. Penny has been acquitted. “It is a strange thing to sit in a courtroom and watch a man die over and over and over again,” Adam Iscoe writes, reporting from the trial. Read the story »More Top StoriesHow Long Will the Trump Crypto Boom Last?The Best Performances of 2024The Confident Anxiety of Rashid JohnsonCan You Write It Better Than Taylor Swift?Daily Cartoon“I feel better since I stopped watching the news.”Cartoon by Shannon WheelerCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copiedShopShopMore Fun & GamesPlay today’s challenging puzzle. A clue: Paris-born Surrealist Dora: four letters.P.S. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” first aired on TV in the U.S. on this day in 1965. It arrived in an “unsettled season, as the so-called generation gap was rending the cultural landscape,” Jonathan Franzen wrote, in a moving personal history about the deep impression the “perfect silliness” of the comic strip left on his adolescence. Despite the social turmoil, “Charles Schulz’s work was almost uniquely beloved.”
In today’s newsletter, an out-of-style genre makes a comeback, and then:
- The acquittal of Daniel Penny
- Michael Schulman on the best performances of 2024
- Rashid Johnson’s metamorphosis
A Feminist Director Takes On the Erotic Thriller
Halina Reijn has always loved the genre—and revelled in creating a steamy melodrama for Nicole Kidman in which the protagonist is “greedy,” “dark,” and “wrong.”
The final day of shooting for “Babygirl,” a new erotic thriller, was devoted to a sequence that the film’s writer and director, Halina Reijn, had deliberately saved for last. In the movie, which will be released on Christmas, Nicole Kidman plays Romy, the hyper-competent C.E.O. of a robotics company, who feigns pleasure in her marriage and flirts perilously with a younger man at work until he tempts her into a kinky affair. In this scene, Romy and her paramour, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), were alone in a cheap hotel room in Manhattan, attempting to define their new dynamic. The environs were unsavory—Reijn had chosen blood-red curtains and carpeting specifically to evoke a womb—but there was a charge in the air. The end of the encounter would be the literal consummation of the couple’s mind games: Romy would orgasm. Keep reading, or listen to the story »
The Lede
How Daniel Penny Was Found Not Guilty in a Subway Killing That Divided New York
The trial over the death of Jordan Neely—which made Daniel Penny, the man who choked him, a right-wing cause célèbre—became a flash point in the debate over crime and vigilantism in big cities. Penny has been acquitted. “It is a strange thing to sit in a courtroom and watch a man die over and over and over again,” Adam Iscoe writes, reporting from the trial. Read the story »
- How Long Will the Trump Crypto Boom Last?
- The Best Performances of 2024
- The Confident Anxiety of Rashid Johnson
- Can You Write It Better Than Taylor Swift?
Daily Cartoon
P.S. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” first aired on TV in the U.S. on this day in 1965. It arrived in an “unsettled season, as the so-called generation gap was rending the cultural landscape,” Jonathan Franzen wrote, in a moving personal history about the deep impression the “perfect silliness” of the comic strip left on his adolescence. Despite the social turmoil, “Charles Schulz’s work was almost uniquely beloved.”
