Reviews of movies and TV focused on women
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Review: Dear Frankie
Read more: Review: Dear FrankieDear Frankie is a 2004 film, but just joined the features available on Amazon Instant Video. It was new to me, and thoroughly enjoyable. Emily Mortimer is Lizzie, the mother of 9 year-old Frankie (Jack McElhone). Lizzie’s mother Nell was played with chain-smoking verve by the late Mary Riggans. The three of them have been…
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Watch This: Trailer for By the Sea
Read more: Watch This: Trailer for By the SeaBy the Sea not only features the most beautiful people in the world, it looks like the most beautiful settings and images in the world. Written and directed by Angelina Jolie (or Angelina Jolie Pitt) and starring Angelina and Brad Pitt it looks emotionally powerful but tensely contained. This couple is emotionally distant but perhaps…
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Review: Ricki and the Flash
Read more: Review: Ricki and the FlashLucky for me I’m not a critic. It seems to me that the main job of a critic is to watch a fun and enjoyable movie or TV show and find things wrong with it so as to make it unenjoyable for anyone else to watch. Which leads to my point: Ricki and the Flash…
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One More Lost Girl Teaser
Read more: One More Lost Girl TeaserLost Girl starts again on Canadian TV on Sept. 6, so we are getting teasers now. Here’s the latest one. The first preview contained some stuff from earlier episodes of the show that we’d already seen. This one is all new scenes. We know Lost Girl would be nothing without Anna Silk. Here she’s her…
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Study: Inequality in Gender, Race and LBGT Status
Read more: Study: Inequality in Gender, Race and LBGT StatusAn extensive study from USC’s Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative (@MDSCInitiative) released last week. The 100 top‐grossing fictional films from 2007 – 2014 (excluding 2011) were studied. That was 700 films with 30,835 characters. All speaking or named characters were assessed. The study puts numbers to things we already knew were there, but here’s…
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Incorporated Heads for SyFy
Read more: Incorporated Heads for SyFyThe SyFy channel ordered a pilot for Incorporated, which sounds a bit like the main theme in Continuum. But Incorporated is from Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Pearl Street Productions. Big names, indeed. It’s a dystopian story about a future 2062. This is a world in which companies have unlimited power, climate change has destroyed the…
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Women Directors, Oh L
Read more: Women Directors, Oh LReading over Little White Lies list of the 100 Greatest Films directed by women gave me an idea. I decided to start using the tag Women Directors on all my blog posts when I write about films or TV shows with women directors. I went back through a lot of old posts and added the…
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Review: Song One
Read more: Review: Song OneSong One is about family. Anne Hathaway plays Franny, a PhD student who gets a call to come home when her brother Henry (Ben Rosenfield) is hit by a car. Their mother is played by Mary Steenburgen. Spoilers ahead.
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Watch This: Trailer for Room
Read more: Watch This: Trailer for RoomRoom is based on a best selling novel by Emma Donoghue. The film stars Brie Larson as Ma and Jacob Tremblay as Jack. Here’s the synopsis. Room’ tells the extraordinary story of Jack, a spirited 5 year old who is looked after by his loving and devoted Ma. Like any good mother, Ma dedicates herself…
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Review: Catastrophe Season 1
Read more: Review: Catastrophe Season 1Catastrophe is an Amazon original series. The first 6 episodes are available now on Amazon Prime. Rob (Rob Delaney), an American, and Sharon (Sharon Horgan), an Irish teacher working in London, meet in a pub. They have sex as often as possible while Rob is in London. Then he goes home, only to be called…