ALL POSTS
Agnes Varda to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award at Locarno Film Festival
French auteur Agnes Varda will receive the 2014 Locarno International Film Festival’s (August 6–16) Golden Pard award, the Swiss event’s lifetime achivement honor. The director of more than...
Weekly Update for June 27 and July 4: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening OpeningJune 27 BoundBy Flesh (doc) — Directed by Leslie Zemeckis Atthe height of their fame, conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton were thetoast of vaudeville....
Maleficent Grosses $600 Million Worldwide, Becomes Fourth Highest-Earning Film of the Year So Far
The Wicked trend of turning villainnesses into anti-heroines continues to pay off. Maleficent has now crossed the $600 million benchmark, becoming the fourth highest-earning film of the year so...
Orange is the New Black Doesn’t Have to Apologize for Not Including Men
Orange is the New Black is a show about women, by women, based on the real experiences of one woman. It’s not perfect, but it’s good. In fact, it’s really, really good! It prominently features...
Trailer Watch: A Man Robs a Bank for Love in the Documentary “The Dog”
Bonnie and Clyde might shame every other star-crossed bank robber with their unimpeachable glamour, but John Wojtowicz was determined to give their romance a run for its money. Directors Allison...
Update: Tina Fey Not Producing Hocus Pocus Sequel, But Developing Another Witch Project
Update: Yesterday, it was widely reported (including by us) that Tina Fey would be producing and possibly starring in Hocus Pocus 2. Deadline quickly put a kibosh on that rumor, however, and claimed...
Lena Waithe to Write BET Pilot Based on Her Webseries “Twenties”
Six Reasons to See Tammy This Weekend
Tammy, the new comedy co-written by and starring Melissa McCarthy, opens today. Sadly, the film is not getting great reviews — at the time of posting, it’s at 18% on Rotten Tomatoes. I may...
Fox Launching Mentoring Program for Women Directors
Fox exec Nicole Bernard will spearhead a new initiative aimed at hiring more women directors at the film and TV studio. The Fox Global Directors Initiative will recruit twenty candidates for a...
July 2014 Film Preview
As was the case in June, July offers lean pickings as far as major women-centric releases are concerned. Tammy, co-written and produced by Melissa McCarthy, whose star has been on the ascent since...
Trailer Watch: It’s Not Easy (But It Sure Looks Like Fun) “To Be Takei”
In his 77 years, George Takei has lived many lives: Star Trek actor, radio announcer, (heterosexual) sex symbol, Japanese-American activist, LGBT activist, social-media icon, and, at long last,...
Beyonce Tops Forbes’ 2014 Celebrity 100 List
2014 is turning out to be the Year of Beyonce, and it’s only half over. Riding high on the creative and commercial success of her self-titled album released late last year, Queen Bey has been...
HBO to Air Docs on Monday Night Year-Round
Documentarians better get their HBO pitch ready, because the premium cable channel is in the market to buy a whole lot more nonfiction content. It looks like the parade of boobs and guts on Game of...
The First Wives Club Musical Planned for Broadway
Proving that boomer nostalgia needn’t always refer back to Mad Men days, a musical adaptation of the 1996 comedy The First Wives Club is in the works for Broadway. But first, it will reopen next...
Jessica Williams is Leaving “The Daily Show” After Raising Its Game
Jessica Williams: “The Daily Show” Your favorite “Daily Show” correspondent is leaving the late-night program. Entertainment Weekly has revealed that Jessica Williams’ last episode will be...
Jessica Williams: Raising The Daily Show’s Game
Keira Knightley Explains Why She Enjoys Working With Female Directors
Keira Knightley is perhaps most recognized for her period collaborations with director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina), but she’d like to be known for something else as...
Beyoncé, Lupita Nyong’o, Nicki Minaj Among BET Awards Winners
Beyoncé was the big winner at last night’s BET Awards, where she was named Best Female R&B/Pop Artist, won Best Collaboration (with husband Jay Z for “Drunk in Love”), and nabbed the...
Judy Blume to Publish Her First Novel for Adults in More than Fifteen Years
Mark your calendars: Judy Blume will publish her first novel for adults since 1998’s Summer Sisters next year. Blume is the author of such school-library staples as Are You There God? It’s Me,...
Donna Tartt and Doris Kearns Goodwin Awarded Carnegie Medals
Novelist Donna Tartt and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin received Carnegie medals in a Las Vegas awards ceremony this past Saturday. Tartt was honored for her bestselling (and prize-collecting)...
Snow White Sequel Ditches Snow White
Where a poisoned apple failed, Hollywood sexism will succeed. News arrived last week that a sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, the 2012 action-oriented feminist revision of the fairy tale, will...
How Melissa McCarthy Became a Box-Office Powerhouse
From my latest Forbes post on Melissa McCarthy’s savvy handling of her post-Bridesmaids career: Tammy is the next step in McCarthy’s career in a variety of ways. One, it’s the first time...
Trailer Watch: Gugu Mbatha-Raw is a Troubled Pop Star in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights
After starring in Amma Asante’s Austenesque romance Belle, Gugu Mbatha-Raw will next be seen as a troubled pop star in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights. At the Los Angeles Film...
Redemption Trail Director Britta Sjogren Talks About Her Modern-Day, Northern Californian Feminist Western
Whether we like it or not, some fictional genres are associated with men. What is more essential to American iconography than the brooding cowboy, standing alone on desert plains as he stares down...
Karen Leigh Hopkins’ Tribeca Film Miss Meadows Finds Distribution
In writer-director Karen Leigh Hopkins’ Miss Meadows, you can see Katie Holmes as you’ve never seen her before: as an elementary-school teacher by day and a gun-toting vigilante (in a...
Only One Female Filmmaker Invited to Join the Academy as a Director; Only 28% of Invitees Are Women
Only 75 74 of the 271 invitees announced yesterday to join the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences were women. That constitutes a paltry 27% of invitees. It’s not just the numbers that paint a...
Sarah Polley to Direct John Green’s Looking for Alaska
Now that The Fault in Our Stars has grossed $166 million on a $12 million production budget — thanks to the irrationally underestimated loyalty of fangirls — Hollywood is looking to...
Wendy and Lisa Win ASCAP’s First Shirley Walker Award
Wendy and Lisa, the musical duo formerly of Prince’s The Revolution band, received the inaugural Shirley Walker Award at the 29th ASCAP Film and Television Awards yesterday. The 500,000-member...
Bound by Flesh Director Leslie Zemeckis on the Love Story Between Two Conjoined-Twin Sisters
Atthe height of their fame, conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton were thetoast of vaudeville. They were among the highest-paid entertainers on thecircuit, and a young Bob Hope was part of their...
Rooney Mara and Megan Ellison to Adapt Somalia Kidnapping Memoir
In 2008, adventurer Amanda Lindhout was kidnapped by Somali ransom-seekers and held and tortured for 460 days. During that time, she converted to Islam for survival, received “wife lessons,” was...
Out in the Night Traces an Attempt to Seek Justice for Queer Women of Color
In Newark, New Jersey, in May 2003, 19-year-old butch lesbian Sakia Gunn was stabbed to death after she politely turned down a sexual advance by an unknown man by telling him that she was a...
Sarah Jessica Parker Eyes Return to TV in Cop Drama
Now that film romantic comedies have gone the way of the dinosaur, and while TV continues to provide rich, substantial roles to women, Sarah Jessica Parker is eyeing a return to the small screen....
Munich Film Festival to Honor Isabelle Huppert with Lifetime Achievement Award
Legendary actress Isabelle Huppert will receive a lifetime-achievement award — one of many already received, and many, many more to come, no doubt — from the 2014 Munich International...
Chicken & Egg Awards 23 Follow-Up Grants; Places Open Call for New Projects
Chicken and Egg Pictures, the only nonprofit film fund devoted solely to supporting women documentary directors, has announced that it will endow follow-up grants to 23 ongoing feature-length...
Review: The Lost Women of The Leftovers
I’ll say this for The Leftovers: it is equal-opportunity sad. Men, women, children: there is enough existential despair in HBO’s new drama to go around, and then some. Damon Lindelof’s...
Trailer Watch: Maggie Gyllenhaal is a British Arms Dealer in The Honorable Woman
Maggie Gyllenhaal has joined the mass migration of prestige film actresses to television. The Dark Knight and Crazy Heart co-star has finally found a role worthy of her considerable talents in...
Why Maleficent is the Rape Revenge Film That We Need
Warning: Lots of Maleficent spoilers ahead.Not since I Spit on Your Grave have I seen such an intrepid and compelling rape-revenge film. I am talking, of course, about Disney’s Maleficent, the...
Trailer Watch: Abigail Breslin is the Final Girl
The Final Girl — the purehearted stock character who turns the tables on the killer by the end of the horror movie — has become so famous she’s gotten her own movie. A blonde Abigail...
Ava DuVernay’s Selma to Be Released Christmas Day
After directing two independent features and one documentary, Ava DuVernay is poised for her Hollywood — and possibly Oscar — breakthrough with Selma, the MLK biopic that’s her biggest...
Will 2014 Be a Breakthrough Year for Women Directors at the Academy Awards?
From my latest Forbes post on the potentially record-breaking awards season to come: “I know it is overly optimistic and a tad delusional to think that women could get two nominations for best...
Feminist Western The Homesman Gets Release Date
One of the films most anticipated by Women and Hollywood is the 2014 Palme d’Or competitor The Homesman. As a dusty, female-centric Western about doing the right thing despite enormous and...
Trailer Watch: Reese Witherspoon Continues Her Comeback Tour with The Good Lie
Fans of Reese Witherspoon will have plenty of chances to see her this Oscar season. She’ll be in the big-screen adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (out December 5) and the much-anticipated...
Julie Taymor Wraps Up Shooting of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Film and theater director Julie Taymor has just wrapped up shooting on her fifth film: a big-screen version of her visually lavish reimagining of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The...
Women Directors Win Majority of LAFF Awards for Features
A majority of the feature prizes at the 2014 Los Angeles Film Festival Awards went to women-directed projects. Winter’s Bone director Debra Granik took home the best-documentary trophy for her...
Orange is the New Black and Fargo Tie for Most Critics’ Choice Wins
With three wins each, Orange is the New Black (Netflix) and Fargo (FX) took home the most trophies at the 2014 Critics’ Choice Awards. OITNB won Best Comedy Series, a tie for Best Supporting...
Weekly Update for June 20: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs (doc) — Directed by Grace Lee One of the most notable women in 20th-century American history gets her due...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Zeina Daccache (Scheherazade’s Diary)
Zeina Daccache is a Lebanese actress, director, and drama therapist. She has directed the award-winning film and stage versions of 12 Angry Lebanese (2009, First Prize — Muhr Arab Documentary...
Human Rights Watch Women Directors: Meet Anne de Mare & Kirsten Kelly (The Homestretch)
Filmmakers and theater artists Anne de Mare and Kirsten Kelly have been making documentaries together for over a decade. Their work has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation, Sundance...
Federation of European Film Directors Demands “Urgent Action” to Tackle the Underrepresentation of Women Filmmakers
In the wake of Cannes jury president Jane Campion’s condemnationof the “inherent sexism” in the film industry last month, the Federation of European Film Directors(FERA) has called for...
Do Colorism Issues Threaten to Stain the Aaliyah Biopic?
After years of rumors, it’s official: Aaliyah is getting a biopic. Lifetime Original Movies announced on Monday that it will adapt Aaliyah: More Than a Woman by former Time music editor...
Iranian Director Mahnaz Mohammadi Jailed, Inspires Petition Demanding Her Release
The imprisonment of Iranian filmmaker, actress, and women’s rights activist Mahnaz Mohammadi since June 7 has sparked international concern and outrage. Mohammadi has been sentenced to a...