Films, News, Women Directors
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...
News
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...
Comedy, Documentary, News, Videos
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...
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...
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...
News, Television
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...
Features, News
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...
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,...
News, Trailers, Videos
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...
Features, Weekly Update
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...
Awards, News, Videos
With four nominations and no wins yet, Julianne Moore might finally deserve her due at the next Academy Awards ceremony. The vehicle that’ll get here? Not the Hollywood-skewering showbiz satire...
News, Women Directors
Producer Gina Belafonte, Killer Films chief Christine Vachon, and writer-director-actress Jocelyn Towne will be among the headliners at the inaugural Fueling Female Filmmakers (F3) event, a new...
News, Theater, Women Writers
American Theatre has released its annual list of the top ten most-produced plays, and while the 2013–2014 season boasted a commendable 50–50 split between male and female writers, a look at the...
Queer film culture has a longhistory, which directly links queer cinema, with its specific aesthetics andpolitics, with the film festival as a community experience. The oldest LGBT/Q film festival...
Awards, News
The San Francisco Film Society has announced the 14 finalists who will be competing for a $300,000 grant from the SFFS and the Kenneth Rainn Foundation. One or more narrative films from the Bay...
Films, News
Cinematography is one of the film industry’s least equal fields. In the last five years, women accounted for just 3% of all cinematographers among the 250 top-grossing films. In what might be the...
French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s fourth feature, Eden, has been a staple this year at major festivals like TIFF and NYFF. And now the 20-year electronica epic has found a distributor in Broad...
News, Theater
Earlier this week, the theatre community in across the UK came together to discuss the problem of gender inequity on its stages. The numbers are just as bad over on that side of the Atlantic as they...
Features, News, Television
News, Women Directors, Women Writers
Fresh off her Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nod for Before Midnight (along with Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke), Julie Delpy is set to start shooting her sixth feature next month. Delpy will...
When the divine Princess Kaguya took earthly form after being born inside a lotus flower, she probably wanted something more out of mortal existence than a marriage conundrum. She doesn’t...
Festivals, News, Women Directors
Seventy percent of the works in competition at the 2014 Abu Dhabi Film Festival (October 23 — November 1) will be directed by women. The ADFF will only showcase shorts (along with a Truffaut...
Features, News, Women Directors
The DGA hosted an event last Saturday night to celebrate the six women who created the Women’s Steering Committee 35 years ago. The 600-seat theatre was packed, with impassioned cheering and...
News, Women Producers
Big-league UK producers Alison Owen (Saving Mr. Banks, The Giver, HBO’s Temple Grandin) and Debra Hayward (Les Miserables, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Atonement) have teamed up to form a new...
Awards, Features, News
As of today, Patricia Arquette stands as the favorite to win a supporting-actress Oscar for her 12-years-in-the-making portrait of devoted motherhood in Boyhood. That is, if you believe the expert...
This past Saturday night, the Directors Guild of America celebratedthe accomplishments of the Pioneering Women Directors of the DGA. Susan Bay, NellCox, Joelle Dobrow, Dolores Ferraro, Victoria...
On Saturday night, Ava DuVernay brought a short clip of her upcoming film Selma (opening Christmas Day) to the Urbanworld Film Festival in NYC. (As Ava put it: “Jason Reitman takes his films to...
The stage version of The Lion King has a lot of things going for it: a universal story, sing-a-long songs, childhood nostalgia for the animated movie, and relatively affordable tickets. But it’s...
Elaine May traveled and told stories on the Yiddish theater circuit evenbefore she was born. In 1932, Jack and Ida Berlin welcomed baby Elaine inPhiladelphia, PA. After Jack’s untimely passing in...
Features, News, Theater
The dearth of women in the theater world is well documented. While the three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama this year were all women, not a single female playwright appeared on the Tony...
Since the end of Desperate Housewives, Eva Longoria has reinvented herself as a producer, especially of projects with Latino leads. Longoria’s biggest producing hit is Lifetime’s...
Features
From my latest Forbes post on the Geena Davis Institute’s new findings on the state of film worldwide: Girls and women are missing. There are 2.24 male characters for every female character. Only...
Films, News, Television
Superheroes haven’t just taken over the multiplex, but the Huluplex too. Debuting this fall are Fox’s Gotham and NBC’s Constantine, which will join CW’s The Flash (in its first season) and...
News, Videos
It’s no secret that the word “feminism” has a PR problem. Just this spring, Shailene Woodley echoed the (misinformed) sentiments of a lot of girls and women when she declared that she wasn’t...
Three months ahead of the release of Unbroken, her second film as director, Angelina Jolie has signaled that she’s serious about her mid-career turn as a filmmaker by announcing her fourth...
Documentary, News, Trailers, Videos
One of the fundamental tenets that I hold true is that women’s rights are human rights, and included in those rights is the right to a safe and legal abortion should a woman want or need one. When...
Few industries have been as utterly transformed in the past decade like those of journalism and the media. Former CSI showrunner Carol Mendelsohn is spinning that anxiety about the changing job...
Television, Women Writers
I thought about whether or not I wanted to dignify the verbal sludge that is Alessandra Stanley’s article about How To Get Away With Murder (and Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal) showrunner Shonda...
Films About Women Opening Tracks Based on a true story, Tracks is the first film (Wild will be the second) to come out this fall about a woman who takes a solitary journey for reflection and...
Music, News
Barbra Streisand is about to make history. In all likelihood, her new album, Partners, will debut at №1 on the Billboard 200 chart next week. What is remarkable about this achievement is that, if...
The trailer has finally arrived for Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz as Margaret and Walter Keane, the couple behind the paintings, postcards, and prints of big-eyed...
Two women-directed films that played at the Toronto International Film Festival have found US distributors. TIFF 2014 was host to two films that rhymed with “Emma Bovary” — Sophie...
Features, Television, Women Directors, Women Writers
From my latest Forbes post on how the progress for women writers and especially directors on the small screen has stalled: Women are stuck, and that is even more clearly illustrated in the data...
When I was offered the role of filmmaker/guinea pig on Chris Moore’s The Chair, a filmmaking experiment-turned-docu-series currently airing on Starz, it was a no brainer. The premise of The Chair...
Documentary, News, Videos
In places like Syria and Libya, where human-rights abuses were/are rampant, someone has to compile, analyze, and collect evidence of crimes against humanity in the midst of chaos to tell the world...
Documentary, Festivals, Interviews, News
Mami Sunada was born in Tokyoand studied documentary filmmaking at Keio University. She broke into film by assisting director Hirokazu Kore-eda on StillWalking and Air Doll. She also wrote and...
Festivals, Interviews, News
Boo Ji-Young attended the Korean Academy of Film Arts. She directed the feature film Sisters on the Road (2009), as well as four shorts: Spark (1997), His Humming (2000), A Drop of Clear Salty...
Awards
Roz Chast, a cartoonist for the New Yorker, has become the first graphic memoirst to be nominated for the National Book Award. Unfortunately, her account of her elderly parents’ difficult few...
When early news of the CBS series Madam Secretary came out, word was the title role was a fictionalized version of Hillary Clinton. (Meanwhile, NBC was said to be developing a Hillary-centric...
Documentary, News
After tackling America’s obesity epidemic in the “sugar is the new tobacco” documentary Fed Up, Katie Couric and director Stephanie Soechtig are reteaming to take a hard look at another...
Already a household name in feminist, queer, and film circles, Alison Bechdel was named one of the 21 recipients of this year’s MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Bechdel was in an Italian castle at...
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