THE NEW YORK TIMES Critic’s Pick: Nina Menkes’s QUEEN OF DIAMONDS

Tinka Menkes as Firdaus in Queen of Diamonds.

Glen Kenny selects Nina Menkes’s newly restored Queen of Diamonds as his critic’s pick in the New York Times:

“The writer David Foster Wallace called Las Vegas “a city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange.” “Queen of Diamonds,” a 1991 film by Nina Menkes set in Vegas now debuting in a new restoration, is, among other things, an urgent portrayal of the tedium of endless transaction.

In one of the movie’s central sequences, the protagonist, Firdaus (her name, derived from the Arabic word for “paradise,” is only said once in the movie), played by the filmmaker’s sister Tinka Menkes, plies her trade as a low-stakes blackjack dealer.”

Read the full review HERE.