ALL POSTS
Hollywood Men Star in White House PSA Against Sexual Assault
After releasing a depressing but unsurprising report that 1 in 5 female college students are sexually assaulted, the White House posted a PSA on its YouTube account starring President Obama and VP...
May 2014 Film Preview
If you’re lucky enough to live in a city with several arthouse theaters, May is a veritable banquet of indie and foreign gems by and about women. And if your choices are limited to the multiplex,...
Sundance London Women Directors: Meet Marjane Satrapi (The Voices)
MarjaneSatrapis’s fourth feature film, The Voices, stars Ryan Reynolds, AnnaKendrick and Gemma Arterton and was included in the Sundance London program this past weekend. Shecame to our attention...
Trailer Watch: Extended Spot for The Fault in Our Stars
An extended trailer has been released for The Fault in Our Stars, and it goes a long way in translating to a three-minute format one of the chief pleasures of John Green’s YA novel: the book’s...
Meet the New Women and Hollywood Columnists
I am thrilled to introduce you to the new Women and Hollywood columnists who will be taking up their posts beginning next week: Sara Stewart will be handling the weekly TV beat. She also works at...
Newport Beach FF Women Directors: Meet Regina Russell (Well Now You’re Here, There’s No Way Back)
After two decades and over fifty film and television roles as an actress, Regina Russell steps behind the camera as director and producer. A visual artist in many mediums, she has always had a...
The Tony Award Nominations: Women Writers Are Missing
The Tony Award nominations were handed out this morning. The thing I noticed immediately is that not a single play written by a woman was nominated. Turns out the problem is that a woman couldn’t...
Hot Docs Women Director: Meet Teodora Ana Mihai (Waiting for August)
Teodora Ana Mihai was born in 1981 in Bucharest, Romania, under Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship. In 1989, she came to Belgium and was reunited with her parents, who had fled the year before. In...
Jane Campion-Led 2014 Cannes Jury is Majority Female
Five women will sit on the nine-person Cannes jury, which means there will be 2.5 women jurors for every woman director in competition. As we reported earlier this month, only two of the 18...
SFIFF Women Directors: Meet Sara Dosa (The Last Season)
Sara Dosa’s past projects include work as an associate producer on Elena and Jacob Kornbluth’s acclaimed documentary about Robert Reich, Inequality for All. A graduate of Wesleyan University,...
SFIFF Women Directors: Meet Julie Bertuccelli (School of Babel)
Julie Bertuccelli is the daughter of filmmaker Jean-Louis Bertuccelli. She worked as an assistant director to several well-known filmmakers before helming several documentaries for television. Her...
Watch: A Jem Fan Responds to the Movie’s Whitewashed Casting
Last week, Jem fan Lindsay Taylor took to YouTube to decry the whitewashed casting for Shana Elmsford, the shy African-American character in the 1980s cartoon about a group of foster kids who become...
The Other Woman Takes the Box Office Crown
I’m going to be honest: I had no desire to see The Other Woman. I saw the poster a couple of months ago, read the premise, and said to myself, no way. Not being a reviewer with an editor assigning...
Sundance’s Keri Putnam Shares What She’s Learned from the Women Filmmakers Initiative
As the Executive Director of the Sundance Institute, Keri Putnam oversees all of the organization’s programs, including the Women Filmmakers Initiative and its associatedresearch. Prior to taking...
Weekly Update for April 25: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Bright Days Ahead — Directed by Marion Vernoux; Co-Written by Marion Vernoux and Fanny Chesnel For recent retiree Caroline (Fanny Ardant) a new life of freedom and...
Argentine Director Lucia Puenzo Helps Her Country Come to Terms With Its Nazi-Sheltering Past
Writer-director Lucia Puenzo’s historical drama The German Doctor (opening April 25) became a sensation in Argentina last year, ultimately amassing nine Sur Awards (the Argentine Oscars),...
SFIFF Women Directors: Meet Jane Pollard (20,000 Days on Earth)
Artist and filmmaker Jane Pollard met her collaborative partner Iain Forsyth at Goldsmiths College in the early 1990s. After the duo earned early acclaim with A Rock ’N’ Roll Suicide (1998), a...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Sheila Canavan (Compared to What: The Improbable Journey of Barney Frank)
Sheila Canavan makes her directorial debut with Compared to What: The Improbable Journey ofBarney Frank. Canavan grew up in Boston and met Frank as a youngcollege student, when they were both...
TV: J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy to Be Adapted for HBO and BBC
J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy will be adapted into a three-hour miniseries for HBO and the BBC. Set in the picturesque English village of Pagford, the novel is Rowling’s first book after...
Third Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Movie Planned
Fans of magical jeans, rejoice! A third installment of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is in the works, with the planned movie picking up ten years after the events of the last movie. The...
Zero Motivation Director Talya Lavie Wins Top Prize at Tribeca
Director Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation won the Tribeca Film Festival’s top prize yesterday. Lavie described her feature debut as “a comi-tragic glimpse into Israeli military society” in an...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Farihah Zaman (This Time Next Year)
This Time Next Year is Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman’s first feature documentary as co-directors. Their short film “Remote Area Medical” premiered at the 2013 Full Frame Documentary Film...
Trailer Watch: Marion Cotillard in The Immigrant
Eastern European immigrant Ewa (Marion Cotillard) arrives at Ellis Island and is promptly separated from her ailing sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan). Stranded in a new land with no one to turn to, she...
Lupita Update: People Cover, Movie Roles, Endorsement Deals
Last month, I confessed that I want Lupita Nyong’o “on every Hollywood short list [and] swiming in gold doubloons inside a McScrooge-like vault.” Since her Best Supporting Actress Oscar win...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Gillian Greene (Murder of a Cat)
The daughter of veteran actor Lorne Greene,Gillian Greene grew up in Los Angeles on the sets of her father’s televisionshows. She attended USC and NYU before moving back to Los Angeles to...
Live-Action Barbie Movie in the Works
Blame it on The Lego Movie: the toys are taking over the multiplex. Sony has announced plans to make a live-action comedy starring Barbie. There have previously been over two dozen animated...
Aaron Sorkin Mansplains Hollywood
This week writer Aaron Sorkin showed up at the Tribeca Film Festival and, in his typical way, gave us some nuggets to digest about how the privileged few in Hollywood regard the rest of us. This is...
Crosspost: What’s It Going to Take for Gender Equality to Come to Hollywood?
Crossposted with permission from Awards Daily. The WGA diversity report, released on April 15, delivered this rather devastating news about women screenwriters in Hollywood: While women and other...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Courteney Cox (Just Before I Go)
Actress Courteney Cox, best known for her Emmy Award-winning comedy Friends and for her Golden Globe-nominated role in Cougar Town, segues behind the camera to make her feature-film directorial...
Trailer Watch: Breastmilk Doc Explores the Many Different Ways to Be a Parent and Nourish
After delving into the dangers of contemporary American motherhood in the documentary The Business of Being Born, producer Ricki Lake is back with another parenting-related feature. Directed by Dana...
Distribution Pioneer Nikki Rocco to Retire
Nikki Rocco, the first and only female distribution chief at a major studio, has announced her retirement. Rocco joined Universal as a 17-year-old high-school senior and stayed on at the studio for...
Rachel Weisz and Toni Collette to Star as BFFs in Catherine Hardwicke’s Miss You Already
Rachel Weisz and Toni Collette will play best friends in Catherine Hardwicke’s upcoming comedy-drama Miss You Already. Morwenna Banks’ script finds two lifelong friends being pulled in...
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s The Nest Gets 2015 Release Date
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s next collaboration, the sister comedy The Nest, will open December 18, 2015. The former SNL co-stars will star as two thirtysomething siblings who return home for one...
Crosspost: The Time of Her Life
Crossposted with permission from DGA Quarterly. Lee Shallat Chemel was recently directing an episode of the critically acclaimed single-camera comedy The Middle when it suddenly dawned on her how...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Eva von Schweinitz (A Film Is a Film Is a Film)
Eva von Schweinitz is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist, working in theater, film, and interactive media. Holding a B.A. in screenwriting, she has expanded her interest in storytelling into...
Cannes Roundup: Few Women Directors at Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week
As we’ve come to expect from Cannes, far too few women will be represented at the French festival — again. Among the 19 features selected by delegate general Edouard Waintrop for...
Meryl Streep Receives Monte Cristo Award from Eugene O’Neill Center
Last night, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center honored Meryl Streep with the Monte Cristo Award, one of the most prestigious acting awards in the country. The ceremony was a homecoming for Streep,...
TV: Keke Palmer to Become Youngest-Ever Talk Show Host
Keke Palmer will make talk-show history by becoming television’s youngest-ever host. The 20-year-old star of Akeelah and The Bee and Nickelodeon’s True Jackson, VP will headline a daytime show...
Trailer Watch: Diane Kurys’ For a Woman + Exclusive Artwork
In Oscar-nominated director Diane Kurys’ (Entre Nous) latest film, a love triangle forms between a man, his wife, and his brother. Michel (Benoit Magimel) and Jean (Nicolas Duvauchelle) believed...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Megan Griffiths (Lucky Them)
Megan Griffiths has been a director, writer, and producer in the independent film community for over a decade. Her film, The Off Hours, premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and went on to...
Trailer Watch: A Young Woman Searches for Her Real Identity in Ida
A teenage nun (Agata Trzebuchowska) on the verge of pleging herself to the Catholic Church discovers the truth about her family origins in Ida. Set in 1960s Poland, the Rebecca Lenkiewicz-penned...
Rape Culture Sidetracks Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones is a show full of violence, including sexual violence, but showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss generally tend to make that violence meaningful. The beheading of Ned Stark, the...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Karen Leigh Hopkins (Miss Meadows)
Born in Sandusky, Ohio, and raised by an Italian factory-workermother whose dream of being an artist were squelched by a teacher who told hershe had not imagination, Karen Leigh Hopkins was not...
Angelina Jolie and Linda Woolverton Talk Maleficent in New Featurette
A new two-minute, behind-the-scenes featurette about Maleficent reveals that the May 30 release will be part-prequel, part-alternate POV. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast, The...
Take the Quiz: How Many Movies By Female Directors Have You Seen?
Buzzfeed’s Alison Willmore has published a great new quiz on women directors that extends all the way back to 19th-century film pioneer Alice Guy-Blache’s The Cabbage Fairy, includes midcentury...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Jessica Yu (Misconception)
Jessica Yu’s award-winning body of work includes her film “Breathing Lessons,” which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short; her documentary for Participant Media on the water crisis,...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Amy Berg (Every Secret Thing)
Amy Berg is a critically acclaimed, Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her documentary Deliver Us From Evil (2006). The film tells the...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Kate Davis (Newburgh Sting)
Kate Davis’ documentary Southern Comfort, a 2001 Sundance Film Festival Grand Prize winner, has won over 25 awards and continues to be screened as a seminal work aimed towards overcoming...
Weekly Update for April 18: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Gabrielle — Written and Directed by Louise Archambault Quebecois director Louise Archambault follows her smart and refreshing debut feature Familia with this tender...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Sabine Lubbe Bakker (Ne Me Quitte Pas)
Filmmaker Sabine Lubbe Bakker was born and raised in Antwerp, Belgium, and has studied in The Netherlands and Brazil. Her credits include the award-winning documentary Shout (2010), Power to the...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Melissa Johnson (Love in the Time of March Madness)
Melissa Johnson is a writer and filmmaker living in Venice, California. She is best known for her award-winning feature documentary, No Look Pass, about a Burmese lesbian basketball star, currently...