Recent events indicate that gender often plays a role in popular film criticism. In February of this year, Rex Reed, film critic for the New York Observer, made an issue of Melissa McCarthy’s weight in his review of Identity Thief. This incident followed closely on the heels of a (now former) male editor at the Niagara Falls Reporter ordering a critic to refrain from reviewing films with strong female characters.

While such anecdotal stories are attention getting, they reveal little about the relationship between gender, film critics, and movie reviews. Read more »

Compassionate Jordan Turner (Halle Berry) is a veteran Los Angeles 911 dispatcher who’s still recovering from a traumatic incident – six months ago – when she was unable to save a teenage girl from the clutches of a psychopathic murderer. Working as an instructor, she shows new recruits around the vast, high-tech Emergency Call Center that’s known as The Hive, as the same “911: what is your emergency?” greeting is methodically repeated at every desk. Read more »

Keeping with his usual dark themes, South Korean director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) makes an assured American debut with this stunning psycho thriller – a cruel, calculated coming of age story that glides elegantly through topics of sexual awakening and fractured family values Read more>>

At Salem Film Fest 2013 (March 7 to 14 in Salem, Massachusetts), the Alliance of Women Film Journalists (AWFJ) has presented EDA Awards to two superb films directed by women. Read more>>

In The We and the I, Michel Gondry makes good on his Be Kind Rewind promise.
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Set in 1945 in the Bavarian countryside just after Germany has surrendered near the end of W.W. II, this is the coming-of-age/survival story of teenage Hannalore Dressler (Saskia Rosendahl), nicknamed Lore, who is left in charge when her parents are taken into custody for war crimes during the Third Reich. Just before her mother (Ursina Lardi) departs, she instructs stolid, responsible Lore to take her four younger siblings – ranging in age from an infant to pre-teen – to their grandmother’s house, some 500 miles to the north, near Hamburg. Read more »

Disney is betting $325 million that audiences, worldwide, are going to flock to see this prequel to Victor Fleming’s classic “Wizard of Oz,” which catapulted Judy Garland to stardom and made L. Frank Baum’s fantasy fable an integral part of American folklore. While Baum wrote 14 Land of Oz novels, he never delved into the wizard’s background. So this is the charlatan-behind-the-curtain’s ‘origin’ story. Read more »

Oscar-nominated as Best Documentary, Dror Moreh’s astonishing glimpse inside Shin Bet, the agency that took over Israel’s internal security service, offers an illuminating, insider’s view of the Arab-Israeli conflict since the Six-Day War in 1967, when one million Palestinians came under Israeli control in the West Bank, Gaza and the old city of Jerusalem. Read more »

Hard times continue for female directors — not only in Hollywood, but at film fests,l Read more>>

There are certain predictable elements to movies like “The Notebook,” “Dear John,” “Message in a Bottle,” based on Nicholas Sparks’ novels: death, danger and disaster, ultimately leading to romance, and punctuated by idyllic, seaside interludes, rainstorms, Spanish moss and a seasonal celebration. Read more »