‘We should use first names. We’re sisters under the mink.’

— Gloria Grahame, The Big Heat (1953)

What’s ‘Sisters Under the Mink’?

It’s an award-winning monthly newsletter, containing essays exploring the dames, mob wives, and gangsters molls of crime movies, but also on the depictions of womanhood and manhood in those movies. From well-known works to little-seen gems, ‘Sisters Under the Mink’ will include writing on cinema spanning from Golden Age Hollywood to ‘60s Japan to contemporary releases. And the stories will cover all sorts of ne’er do wells: serial killers, bank robbers, gangsters, and lovers on the run, so long as somebody is breaking the law. Going forward, there may also be a few deep-dives about forgotten starlets, murdered prizefighters, and real-life LA Confidential-style madams who gave the mafia and the LAPD a run for their money. Essay lengths and frequency will vary, but I can promise the content is fresh.

If you choose a paid subscription, those costs will be helping me - a freelance journalist - to do the work while removing the strenuous process of continual pitching to editors, who tend to prefer topical hooks. Your money will also help me continue to provide deeply-researched materials for the newsletter, including the costs of books and subscriptions to various archives where I can access the information I need.

In 2021, Sisters Under the Mink won a UK Freelance Writing Award for Best Newsletter of the Year, and was a featured publication on the Substack Discover page.

Who am I?

My name is Christina Newland, and I’m a freelance writer on film, culture, and occasionally boxing, for places like Rolling Stone UK, Criterion, BBC Culture, Sight & Sound, and many mores. I am also the lead film critic for national daily the i Newspaper. I’m a displaced upstate New Yorker living in London.

I tend to write about the intersections between star power, womanhood, sex, glamour, and cinema history, as well as the depictions of masculinity onscreen during the American 20th century, from the Great Depression to the Watergate scandal and beyond.

Where else can you find me?

You can find me on Twitter or read some of my writing for BBC, Vulture, and various other publications here.

Subscribe to Sisters Under the Mink

writing about women & crime in cinema, from serial killers to mob wives and beyond

People

a film critic & culture writer, thinking about women in crime cinema. bylines: VICE, Empire, BBC, Vulture, Hazlitt, Sight & Sound, MUBI, LWLies.