| In the latest installment of The New Yorker Interview, the actor Geena Davis reflects on her Oscar-winning career—and on her more recent work as a self-described “data geek.” Despite Davis’s starring roles in major hits such as “A League of Their Own” and “Beetlejuice,” her career slowed down sharply after she turned forty, a frustration that helped inspire the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which has tracked onscreen diversity for nearly two decades. Davis’s feminist bona fides stretch back to the heights of her acting career. In 1991, she starred with Susan Sarandon in “Thelma & Louise,” about a pair of working-class Arkansas women who go on the lam after a violent parking-lot encounter with a man. The movie proved divisive: although it scored at the box-office and was embraced in many reviews, it also drew ire for its undisguised politics. In The New Yorker, the critic Terrence Rafferty issued a notably mixed review, deriding the script’s “gimmickry” but praising nearly everything else. (Not everyone agreed; the film’s screenwriter, Callie Khouri, went on to receive the film’s only Oscar.) It’s one of those reviews in which even the criticisms make the movie sound worthwhile. “The funny thing about ‘Thelma & Louise’ is that you can recognize the crudeness of the script’s devices and still have an awfully good time,” Rafferty writes. “Davis and Sarandon are so vivid and likable that they carry us past the plot’s most obvious contrivances; a little disbelief seems a small price to pay for being allowed to remain in their company.” | 
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