Director Karen Moncrieff joyously celebrated her daughter’s first birthday at last monh’s premiere of “The Dead Girl, her somber feature based on her own experiences and observatons while on jury duty during a murder trial. As David Olsen reports in his Los Angeles Times interview with Moncrieff, the director wisely took her baby home before the screening started– the film she birthed simply isn’t kid proof. more

Sundance’s 2007 roster boasts 50 films by women, including fiction features, documentaries, shorts and an animation. Special mention should be made of the festival’s postumous premiere of Adrienne Shelly’s WAITRESS. Read more

GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S A-MAZE-ING MYTHOLOGY

Guillermo del Toro’s amazing gift for fantasy, known to and appreciated by “Hellboy” and “Devil’s Backbone” fans, reaches new heights in “Pan’s Labyrinth,” a film in which this brilliant cinematic auteur catapults the horror genre into the realm of mythology. Read more

A whopper of a heart-kicker, “Children of Men” is a full-throttle futuristic thriller with a flat-out fabulous performance by Clive Owen as a British civil servant in a bleak, despairing, depressing world that’s been thrown into chaos and anarchy. Read more

For starters, you have Dame Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, arguably two of our finest actresses, in remarkably rich roles, giving stunningly complex performances that will undoubtedly enhance their already exceptional track records. And, both actresses are fast out of the gate in “Notes,” and keep up an exhilarating, lightening paced race of wits until the film‘s conclusion. Read more

AWFJ members weigh in with their annual top ten lists, including the first ever top ten from USA Today’s Susan Wloszczyna: Read more

Yellow chrysanthemums splash the screen in director Zhang Yimou’s cross between a martial arts epic and soap opera-like melodrama about class and power struggles. Read more

The Face that Launched a Thousand Screams: Barbara Steele

By all rights, Barbara Steele’s face should be kittenish: the high, wide forehead; the huge, round eyes; the tiny tapered chin. But it’s nothing of the kind. It’s a pale, angular mask as hard and polished as her name. Read more

AWFJ member Thelma Adams sniffs hypocrisy in the making of “Perfume: The Story of A Murderer,” the historical serial killer movie set in 18th century France. As Adams comments on the Huffington Post, director Tom Tykwer starts out “reaching for Steven Spielberg battleground realism” in the film “whopping gag-inducer” opening which visually captures the fetid environment of Paris’ fish market, but presents images of the killer’s female victims– “bulemic, small-busted beauties, all lit like angels”– as thought they belonged on the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Read more