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Trailer Watch: The Return Directed by Liza Johnson
I’ve been wating for this one since it premiered at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. It will open in limited release on Feb 10 and on VOD Feb. 28. Linda Cardellini plays a soldier returning...
Meryl Streep to be Feted at Berlin Film Festival
Some good news for Meryl Streep and The Iron Lady. First, the box office for the film which opened December 30 was terrific. It grossed $280,409 in four theatres (in NY and LA) for an amazing total...
Cross-Post: 20 Years of Black Lesbian Cinema Before Pariah
Dee Rees’ debut film, Pariah, has rightfully been celebrated for its tender coming-out and coming-of-age story of a shy yet sexually curious 17-year-old African-American girl, Alike (Adepero...
The Year That Was
Happy new year everyone. Thanks so much for the great support over the last year. As we start the new year, I thought it would be interesting to look at the narratives that dominated the...
The Iron Lady
As a person who cares about women’s leadership, The Iron Lady should be a no-brainer. A film with an AMAZING tour-de-force performance by Meryl Streep playing a woman who was the longest serving...
Interview with Phyllida Lloyd — director of The Iron Lady
Women and Hollywood: This is a very different biopic of a leader because it is of a female leader. What about this films makes it different in terms of leadership? Phyllida Lloyd: First of all...
Rooney Mara to Cover EW
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hasn’t opened at the level that Sony would have liked, just $27 million in 6 days of release, (see Thompson on Hollywood analysis of what went wrong) but it goes...
Hester Street Directed by Joan Micklin Silver Among Films Added to National Film Registry
Each year 25 films are added by the Library of Congress to the National Film Registry. This year included in the list is the ground breaking film Hester Street directed by Joan Micklin Silver....
Interview with Abi Morgan — writer of The Iron Lady
I was lucky enough to meet the multi-talented Abi Morgan who has had an amazingly successful year with The Hour, Shame and The Iron Lady on the day after the premiere of The Iron Lady in NYC. Women...
Meryl Streep Feted at the Kennedy Center Honors
Here are Meryl’s friends and colleagues celebrating her work.
Pariah — written and directed by Dee Rees
Most of this review was written after screening the film at the Toronto Film Festival. It has been augmented. The movie is just so good. Well written, well acted, emotional, devastating and...
Interview with Dee Rees — Writer and Director of Pariah
Pariah opens in limited release tomorrow. I was able to catch it and the Toronto Film Festival. Here is my conversation with writer/director Dee Rees. Women and Hollywood: Why did you start the...
Last Chance for Discounted Tickets for the Athena Film Festival
Prices go up as of January 1. The Athena Film Festival will take place from February 9–12, 2012 at Barnard College in NYC. We will be announcing the lineup and awardees on January 10. Single...
In My Humble Opinion- The Best Female Directed Films of 2011
It goes without saying that women made all kinds of films this year. But the reality is that most made indie films. Only a couple made studio films. And the numbers of women directing films is still...
Interview with Adepero Oduye star of Pariah
This is the week when Pariah starts to roll out and I can’t say emphatically enough that when this film comes to your town, you must see it. I was able to speak with the star of the film Adepero...
In the Land of Blood and Honey — Written and Directed by Angelina Jolie
A couple of months ago the description of Angelina Jolie’s writing and directing debut was that it was a love story set in the time of the Bosnian war. I walked out of the film realizing that no...
Twilight’s Melissa Rosenberg Becomes Highest Grossing Female Screenwriter
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Melissa Rosenberg, the writer of all five Twilight movies has now surpassed Linda Woolverton as the top grossing female screenwriter with her films grossing a...
Rita Moreno — An 80 Year Old Dynamo
She’s won an Oscar, Emmy, Tony and Grammy. She’s Fran’s mom on Happily Divorced, has her own one woman show, is celebrating 50 years of West Side Story and just turned 80. Here’s your...
Teaser Trailer: Game Change on HBO
Judd Apatow on Funny Women and Flukes
Judd Apatow now knows that making a great movie targeted at women is a way to make money. You get the women and you get the men. Even though he looks prescient, he admits that he was making a movie...
Women’s Film Critics Circle Award Winners
I love the diversity of categories. But where is the best woman director? UPDATE- the best womena director is the director of the best movie by women. I think we name the women because people need...
We Need to Talk About Kevin Gets Five Nominations from the London Critics Film Circle
This film is clearly being better recevied overseas as a full body of work than it is here in the US. Here, Tilda Swinton has gathered some nominations and could be on her way to an Academy Award...
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Watching the bleak, intense, colorless, vibrant, taut thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo made me elated and sad at the same time. Elated because FINALLY here is a movie with an amazing female...
Sony’s Woman Problem
I for one am psyched to see The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (which I will be seeing later today.) But not all women are excited according to a piece last week in Vulture. Sony seems to be nervous...
Circumstance Producer Karin Chien Takes on the Producers Guild
There has been a bit of a controversy last week over the Producer’s Guild nominees. Karin Chien, the producer of Circumstance learned that her film was disqualified from the PGA Awards because the...
Meryl on the Narrowing of the Film Audience
There are not many people who can get away with saying that the film business has basically thrown away everyone except for teenage boys, but that’s exactly what Meryl Streep did last night on...
Listen to Holland Taylor Talk About Playing Ann Richards in a New One Woman Show
Ann begins previews at the Kennedy Center in DC before hopefully coming to Broadway. Here is Taylor talking to David Gregory in a Meet the...
Meryl Streep Will Be on 60 Minutes Tonight
And she is on the cover of the new Newsweek appearing on newstands tomorrow.
A Much Better Picture: The Hollywood Reporter Producer’s Roundtable
Two women — Letty Aronson and Kathleen Kennedy — out of seven. Way better than zero which was the amount of women in their writer and director roundtables. THR’s Producer Roundtable: 7...
Guest Post: I Graduated from the Corman School of Filmmaking
At 19, I decided that I wanted to make movies but unfortunately I did not get the opportunity to attend film school. I relied on DVD extras and books in order to educate myself about cinema and how...
The Golden Globe Nominations: The Women
I like the Golden Globe show cause it’s always goofy. People drink, say funny stuff and you get TV and film people in one place. People who are awards watchers don’t take it too seriously...
Natalie Portman Takes Her Oscar Win Out for a Test Run
While Natalie Portman might have been off our radar screen since last February when she won the best actress Oscar and disappeared to have her baby, yesterday we learned through the Hollywood...
The Help and Bridesmaids Score Screen Actors Guild Nominations
Yesterday, the 18th Annual Screen Actors Guild nominations were announced. Both The Help and Bridesmaids scored best ensembles nominations (which is their top award) which could be an indicator of...
Cross-Post: No Women Allowed
I was recently introduced to a very rare and beautiful creature — a woman who works within the top echelons of an almost exclusively male below-the-line craft in both film and television....
Pariah Writer/Director Dee Rees Talks to Lincoln Center’s Richard Pena
Pariah Writer/Director Dee Rees Talks to Lincoln Center’s Richard Pena
Hollywood Reporter Acknowledges That The Industry is Sexist
The Hollywood Reporter in the wake of their complete dismissal of women in both its writer and director roundtables has done a 360 and put together a whole cover on the lack of women directors and...
Trailer Watch: What To Expect When You Are Expecting — Written by Shauna Cross and Heather Hach
Can one hope that this movie won’t suck if Shauna Cross the writer of Whip-It has written it? I will hope…
The 2011 Black List Arrives With Very Few Women on it
The anticipation for the Black List gets bigger each year. It was even hard getting on the site this morning and I read it was trending on twitter in LA. But one thing hasn’t changed, the number...
Meryl Streep Covers Vogue for the First Time
A rockin 62 year old woman on the cover of Vogue. What is this world coming to? I totally can’t wait to read the whole interview (and this will be the first Vogue I have purchased in a loooong...
AFI Picks Top TV Shows and Films of the Year
This list reminds me that even though they have been upteen articles about how women are making great strides, there is still such a long way to go, because as I look at the lists I notice that...
Hollywood Feminist of the Day: Helen Mirren
Helen Mirren co-hosted the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo over the weekend with Rosario Dawson. The concert honored Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Tawakkul...
Jane Fonda Receives Sherry Lansing Leadership Awards
At the Hollywood Reporter Women in Entertainment breakfast in LA last week, Jane Fonda who has been an advocate for women and girls issues for many years — first by starting the Georgia...
Young Adult
I heart Young Adult. I heart it because it is an awesome and original story. I heart it because Charlize Theron hits it out of the park as the horribly bitchy Mavis a woman stuck in her high school...
Talking Oscars and Feminism with Scott Feinberg of the Hollywood Reporter
Check out this audio interview I did with Scott Feinberg — Oscar analyst at the Hollywood Reporter. We talked about the Oscar race with a feminist slant. I really enjoyed the...
We Really Need to Talk About Kevin and Lynne Ramsay
I saw We Need to Talk About Kevin co-written and directed by Lynne Ramsay at the Toronto Film Festival. It was one of the best movies I saw there and it is still one of the best movies that I have...
Interview with Diablo Cody
Diablo Cody was kindly able to take a few minutes to talk Young Adult and feminism in the film business on the eve of the opening of her new film. It’s good to know that we have a strong feminist...
Watch the Q and A With Meryl Streep and Phyllida Lloyd
You make have to wait another couple of weeks to see the film but now you can watch the Q and A conducted by The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg on Tuesday night at the DGA theatre in...
Take a Look at the Busiest Woman in Movies This Year: Jessica Chastain
If you haven’t seen Jessica Chastain in a movie this year, you haven’t been to the movies because she has been in five, some big and some small. Most actors would be lucky to have one role that...
New Trailer for The Iron Lady
Film opens December 30
Women in Entertainment Power 100 List
The Hollywood Reporter published its annual list of the most powerful women in entertainment yesterday and the news is that women rule TV and really don’t have enough power in the film business. I...