ALL POSTS
Weekly Update for October 10: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women OpeningYou’re Not You — Co-Written by Shana Feste Hilary Swank plays a very put together successful woman who seems to have the perfect life. Yet that life quickly...
Power Showrunners — The Women
The Hollywood Reporter has published its list of the “50 Power Showrunners of 2014.” The list features 14 women who serve as the showrunners for 16 series. You’ll definitely recognize some of...
Guest Post: Finding a Rare POV on a Familiar Global Issue in ‘Waiting for August’
There have been many discussions in the film industry lately about the stubborn imbalance against women’s representation in cinema. Although we have gone a long way in theright direction, there is...
4 Ways Shonda Rhimes Is Changing the Conversation About Herself
As TV’s most successful female showrunner — and TV’s most successful black showrunner — there are a lot of questions Shonda Rhimes is sick of being asked. Sometimes well-intended,...
LFF Women Directors: Josephine Decker — ‘Butter on the Latch’ & ‘Thou Wast Mild and Lovely’
One of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of 2013, Josephine Decker makes films, performances, and friends in strange places. Her newest two films, Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and...
The Big O: Who’s More Overdue for a Win — Amy Adams or Julianne Moore?
Think back to last year’s Best Actress category and what a titanic lineup it was. Sandra Bullock for Gravity, Judi Dench for Philomena, Meryl Streep for August: Osage County, and Cate Blanchett,...
Mary Harron, Karyn Kusama, Jennifer Lynch, Jovanka Vuckovic to Direct Horror Anthology
Anthologies are one way the horror genre has experimented with new stories, effects, and themes without the arduous burden of stretching out a good idea or visual into feature length. As with...
Biopic of Mexican Pop Superstar Gloria Trevi Finds Distribution
Pop stars: they’re not like us. Most of us don’t wear conical bras in public, judge televised singing contests, or French-kiss our professional competitors for the cameras. But Mexican diva...
The Mother of all Bad Guys: ‘Homeland’ Returns
[This essay contains some spoilers for the last episode of Homeland Season 3 and the first two episodes of Season 4.] I’ve never watched a character go from complicated to villainous in the public...
LFF Women Directors: Desiree Akhavan and Cecilia Frugiuele — ‘Appropriate Behaviour’
Appropriate Behavior writer-director Desiree Akhavan is the Iranian-American co-creator and star of the criticallyacclaimed web series The Slope, acomedy that follows a pair of superficial,...
Watch: Gillian Jacobs and Leighton Meester Are Codependent Besties in the Female-Friendship Comedy ‘Life Partners’
Paige is straight, Sasha is gay. Paige suddenly has a fiance, Sasha is still alone. The first of these two situations isn’t remotely a problem. The second one, though, creates a riff between the...
Jessica Chastain Deconstructs Strong Female Characters as “A Disservice to Women”
Jessica Chastain has called out for more female protagonists once more as part of her press tours for The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her/Him (October 10), Interstellar (November 7), and A Most...
Kerry Washington Lands Her First Starring Film Role in More Than a Dozen Years
I first saw Kerry Washington in a 2001 indie called Lift, in which the Scandal star played a put-together young woman with a shoplifiting problem. Written and directed by Boston natives DeMane Davis...
13 Studio Execs Sign On to Mentor for AFI Directing Workshop for Women
Thirteen female executives from the six major studios will assume mentorship duties for filmmakers at the AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women (DWW). Those women comprise the “Executive Circle,”...
Scarlett Johansson to Star in Edith Wharton Miniseries
No one’s had a better career in the last year than Scarlett Johansson. She earned enthusiastic praise (and some Oscar consideration) for a vocal performance in Her, followed up with crowd-pleasing...
LFF Women Directors: Shira Geffen — ‘Self Made’
Self Made’s opening scene sees a young woman sleeping contentedly, only for her bed to suddenly give way and collapse underneath her. It is a moment that is at once dreamlike and shocking, and it...
Watch: New Trailer for Kristen Stewart’s Guantanamo Drama ‘Camp X-Ray’
Guest Post: Patience is a Virtue — and a Screenwriter’s Best Friend
It’s the spring of 2006. A book arrives by messenger, sent to me by my agent: Addicted by Zane, about “a woman’s sexual obsession.” Compelling title. Provocative cover. I open to a page at...
London Film Fest Director Clare Stewart on Cinephilia as a Religion and Her Advice to Future Programmers
As the Director of the London Film Festival and the Head of Exhibition at the BFI, Clare Stewart has curated and will showcase nearly 250 films this month. The London festival will run from October...
Julia Louis-Dreyfus to Receive BAFTA’s Charlie Chaplin Award
National treasure and perennial award-winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus (five Emmy and counting!) will receive another recognition of her genius later this month at the 2014 BAFTA LA Britannia Awards. The...
Makers Presents ‘Women in Hollywood’; ‘Maleficent’ Screenwriter Linda Woolverton on What’s Changed and What Hasn’t
Tonight, the Makers documentary series continues with a look at women in Hollywood. There are some great interviews, including one with Jane Fonda, where she talks about how she was able to get her...
17% of Oscar Submissions for Foreign Language Film Are Directed by Women
In the past few decades, the Oscar race for Foreign Language Film has been kinder — or maybe just fairer — to female filmmakers. Three women — Marleen Gorris, Caroline Link, and...
Watch: Frances McDormand is a Maine Toughie in Lisa Cholodenko’s ‘Olive Kitteridge’
Olive Kitteridge (Frances McDormand) is many things: beloved teacher, resented mother, seen-it-all middle-ager, wry chronicler of her small Maine town. Based on author Elizabeth Strout’s...
Ruba Nadda’s ‘October Gale’ and Liv Ullmann’s ‘Miss Julie’ Find Distribution
Three weeks after their debuts at the Toronto International Film Festival, two women-centric, women-directed films have found distribution. Writer-director Ruba Nadda’s October Gale has been...
Weekly Update for October 3: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Gone Girl There hasn’t been a soignée blonde so flat-out hate-able since Gwyneth bitched about the burdens of motherhood. Welcome to the A-list, Gone Girl star Rosamund...
Sarah Jessica Parker and Catherine Zeta-Jones Board Women-Directed Films
Sarah Jessica Parker and Catherine Zeta-Jones have signed on to starring roles in projects by European female filmmakers. Parker will return to the rom-com genre in Ella Lemhagen’s All Roads Lead...
A Woman You Should Know: Margaret Nagle — Developer of the Red Band Society and the Writer of The Good Lie
Margaret Nagle was one of the first women in met in Hollywood who told me really what it was like to be a working woman in Hollywood. She told me about unbelievable (which I totally believed)...
Guest Post: Only 26% of UK Film Crews Are Female — Which is Better than in the US
Earlier this year, I published a report into what percentage of crews on the top-grossing US films of the past 20 years are women. I found that, on average, women made up only 23% of a typical film...
Anna D. Shapiro Takes Over as Steppenwolf Artistic Director from Martha Lavey
Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company will pass the torch from one female artistic director to another next year when Anna D. Shapiro takes over the position that Martha Lavey has occupied for two...
Winners of Women Composers Competition Announced
The League of American Orchestras and EarShot have named Julia Adolphe and Melody Eotvos the winners of a new program designed to promote women composers. Adolphe and Eotvos will each be awarded...
Watch: First Look at ‘Inside Out,’ Pixar’s First Girl-Centric Movie After ‘Brave’
It took Pixar nearly two decades to make a movie with a female protagonist, but fortunately the studio seems to have gotten the memo that girls and women watch adorable animated adventures too....
Mill Valley Film Fest to Showcase 35 Women-Directed Films, Celebrate Elle Fanning and Laura Dern
Lynn Shelton’s Laggies, Doris Dorrie’s Que Caramba Es La Vida, and Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem are among the nearly three dozen women-directed films...
Sherry Lansing Biography Scheduled for 2016 Release
Sherry Lansing, the first female head of a major film studio, will be the subject of a new biography to be penned by Hollywood Reporter editor Stephen Galloway. The as-yet-untitled book will be...
Sunday Night Sex Talks: Turning Weekend Brunch with the Girls into a Monthly Storytelling Experience
Six months into my life in Los Angeles, I realized that I did nothave enough female friends. I was living with two wonderful gay men in West Hollywood, dating a smart and sweet television...
‘Bad Judge’ Review: I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This
I’m going to use the word bad a lot in this post, and I already feel bad about it. As must actress Kate Walsh, who took on a seemingly interesting lead role in Bad Judge, the new NBC comedy about...
Quvenzhané Wallis Books New Gig in Adaptation of Bestseller ‘Counting by 7s’
Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis has signed on for The Mazur/Kaplan Company and Olympus Pictures’ adaptation of Counting by 7s, based on Holly Goldberg Sloan’s bestselling novel. Wallis will...
Helen Mirren to Reprise Her Role as Elizabeth II on Broadway
Helen Mirren will soon reprise the role that made her an Oscar winner, that of Queen Elizabeth II, on Broadway. Here’s the twist: Mirren won’t be starring in a stage adaptation of The Queen,...
New ‘Twilight’ Shorts Directed by Women to Appear on Facebook
Great news for Twilight fans — and even better news for aspiring women filmmakers: Lionsgate, the studio behind the film series, and Stephenie Meyer, who, of course, wrote the Twilight novels,...
The Big O: If the Girl in ‘Gone Girl’ Provokes Debate, Oscar Noms Might Follow
Much of the suspense over Gone Girl, at least among the film journalists who were the first to witness David Fincher’s latest thriller at the New York Film Festival, has not revolved around any...
‘Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason’ Is the Highest-Grossing Women-Directed European Film in the Last Decade
From my latest Forbes post on why there are still major issues with women-centric content in Europe, where there are more women directors than in the US. Sometimes I think that Europe is leading the...
October 2014 Film Preview
October may be the time of ghosts and ghouls, not that you’d know it from the many diverse film offerings made by and starring women this month. But we definitely start with one ghoul: the one in...
Women in Film, Indiegogo, and the Black List Launch New Award for Young Female Filmmakers
When it comes to fostering female directing talent, support and mentorship can’t come soon enough. To that end, a group of producers, media companies, and film organizations have come together to...
Mary-Louise Parker to Pen Memoir
After a quarter-century in Hollywood, Mary-Louise Parker will reflect on her life in a memoir — though not necessarily about her career. In Dear Mr. You, “an autobiographical literary work...
‘Makers’ Starts Tonight With History of Women in Comedy
It was less than a decade ago that the late Christopher Hitchens, a respected writer and thinker, wondered aloud in a mainstream publication “why women aren’t funny.” Many rational people...
Kate Winslet’s ‘A Little Chaos’ Finds Release Date
Those of us who have missed Kate Winslet playing headstrong women in period garb have much to look forward to in A Little Chaos. Winslet reunited with her Sense and Sensibility co-star Alan...
Three New Sci-Fi Epics With Female Protagonists in Development
Or maybe it’s just the “Hollywood’s finally getting its head out of its ass” effect. News arrived yesterday that three separate sci-fi tales with female protagonists are currently in...
All-Female Sports Talk Show to Debut Sept. 30
Just a few weeks after the Ray Rice video plainly illustrated that women’s issues (and a humane sense of right and wrong) are sorely lacking in both professional sports and its commentariat, the...
Hollywood Feminist of the Day: John Cusack
Hollywood has been kind to John Cusack, who steered his teen stardom into over six dozen acting credits. But the Say Anything icon, who appears in the industry-savaging Maps to the Stars (out early...
Review: Rosamund Pike Gives An Oscar Worthy and Career Making Performance in ‘Gone Girl’
There hasn’t been a soignée blonde so flat-out hate-able since Gwyneth bitched about the burdens of motherhood. Welcome to the A-list, Gone Girl star Rosamund Pike! The tall, slender,...
Watch: A Mother is Terrorized by Her Child’s Favorite Book in ‘The Babadook’
When it debuted at Sundance this year, writer-director Jennifer Kent’s debut, The Babadook, became one of the festival’s breakout hits, with critics praising the film as a “flat-out...
Weekly Update for September 26: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Bjork: Biophilia Live (doc) In 2011, Icelandic artist Björk released her eighth full-length studio album Biophilia, yet the Biophilia project has continued beyond an album...