Tara Kenny

Tara Kenny is a culture writer and critic from Naarm/Melbourne. She is The Monthly’s television critic and has also been published in Interview, The Guardian, Dazed, i-D, Paper, The Saturday Paper, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and elsewhere. Highbrow analysis of ‘lowbrow’ culture and the ways women use and are represented in the media are recurring fixations in her work.

Instagram: @slurpette

Website: www.tara-kenny.com

Location: Naarm/Melbourne

Movie location I call home: Cher’s digital wardrobe in Clueless.

What was the film or experience that made you want to write about the screen?
When I was in grade three, my friend [redacted] and I went to see the James Van Der Beek high school football movie Varsity Blues. During a particularly scintillating scene involving a whipped cream bikini, she fled the cinema in tears and ran to a payphone to call her mum and confess to watching a forbidden M-rated movie. I had witnessed the power of cinema and needed to know more!

Why do you think film criticism matters in 2024?
The omniscient sniper film critic may be increasingly redundant, but we’ll always need critics to guide us to consider art in deeper ways. And while Filmtok recommendation vlogs, pithy Letterboxd reviews and the incessant meme-ing of popular movies all have their place, nothing elevates the discourse quite like thoughtful and rigorous criticism.

Who is a critic that inspires you?
Naomi Fry at The New Yorker, for her uncanny ability to take seemingly inane and ridiculous topics – from Ben Affleck’s back tattoo to Gwyneth Paltrow’s court wardrobe – and illuminate their broader cultural ramifications.

In five words, the future of cinema is: Hopefully, more of life’s pleasures.

What’s your favourite film that you’ve seen this year?
May December. I love how it started with a tabloid story that could have been the basis for a straight-ahead exploitative biopic and took it to such unexpected emotional spaces. For me, it was a return to Safe-era Todd Haynes.

My MIFF 2024 theme music is: Arthur Russell, ‘You Did It Yourself’: “Last night, the movie, oooh / Did it to me / I understood all of it very well / I didn’t like the ending, though / Maybe I’m crazy, but it just seemed tacked on.”