ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

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Opening Jul 18 – 24, 2022 – Margaret Barton-Fumo reports

Margaret Barton-Fumo , ,
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The Alliance of Women Film Journalists highlights movies made by and about women. With a vigilant eye toward current releases, we maintain an interactive record of films that are pertinent to our interests. Be they female-made or female-centric productions, they are films that represent a wide range of women’s stories and present complex female characters. As such, they are movies that will most likely be reviewed on AWFJ.org and will qualify for consideration for our annual EDA Awards, celebrating exceptional women working in film behind and in front of the camera. Our members are feature writers, columnists and regular contributors to a variety of media outlets and many of us publish regularly on the festival circuit. Our critical voices are widespread and diverse. We invite you to join us in tracking weekly releases of particular interest. And we welcome information about new films that will help us to keep our records updated and our critics alert. Below is a concise list of new releases set for the week of July 18 – 24, 2022 that are of particular interest. Film titles highlighted in red have links to full reviews.

Tuesday, July 19 

  • Aftershock – Hulu – USA – Documentary co-directed by Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee. Following the deaths of two young women due to childbirth complications, two bereaved families galvanize activists, birth-workers and physicians to reckon with one of the most pressing American crises today: the US maternal health crisis.

Friday, July 22

  • Alone Together – Vertical Entertainment (Cinemas; VOD Release July 29) – USA – Drama written, directed by and starring Katie Holmes. Two strangers embroiled in bad relationships wind up in the same upstate New York Airbnb.

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  • Anything’s Possible – Amazon Prime – USA – Romance written by Ximena García Lecuona and directed by Billy Porter. A delightfully modern Gen Z coming-of-age story that follows Kelsa, a confident high school girl who is trans, as she navigates through senior year.

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  • Art of Love – Samuel Goldwyn – Puerto Rico – Erotic thriller co-written and directed by Betty Kaplan. A mysterious, erotic and haunting love story between a writer/professor at Puerto Rico’s leading University and an aspiring artist from the immigrant Chinese community.

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  • Bundles – Gravitas Ventures (Cinemas) – USA – Drama. A school girl’s harmless plot for revenge inspires a lucrative business, until a group of friends find themselves in a hairy situation.

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  • The Daphne Project – Mailuki Films (NY Premiere) – USA – Comedy co-written, co-directed by and starring Zora Iman Crews. Daphne Wilco, actress and social justice warrior, wreaks havoc on a production of Euripides’ “The Bacchae” in the name of progress, her progress.

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  • How to Please a Woman – Brainstorm Media – Australia – Drama written and directed by Renée Webster. When her all-male house-cleaning business gets out of control, a mature woman must embrace her own sexuality, if she is to make a new life for herself.

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  • My Donkey, My Lover, & I – Greenwich Entertainment (Cinemas) – France / Belgium – Romantic comedy written and directed by Caroline Vignal, starring Laure Calamy. A schoolteacher crashes her married lover’s family vacation and befriends a donkey named Patrick.

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  • The Nan Movie – Screen Media Films (Cinemas, VOD) – UK – Comedy co-written by and starring Catherine Tate. Catherine Tate’s iconic character Nan hits the big screen as she goes on a wild road trip from London to Ireland with her grandson Jamie (Mathew Horne) to make amends with her estranged sister Nell (Katherine Parkinson).

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  • Skies of Lebanon – Dekanalog (Cinemas) – France – Drama directed by Chloé Mazlo, co-written by Mazlo with Yacine Badday. Shot by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, starring Alba Rohrwacher. In the 1950s, Alice leaves her Swiss homeland for Lebanon. There, the best years of her life are marred by the threat of war.

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  • Where the Crawdads Sing – Sony Pictures Classics (Cinemas) – USA – Thriller directed by Olivia Newman. Screenplay by Lucy Alibar, adapted from the novel by Delia Owens. A woman who raised herself in the marshes of the deep South becomes a suspect in the murder of a man with whom she was once involved.

  Sunday, July 24

  • Topside – Vertical Entertainment (Hulu) – USA – Drama co-written and directed by Logan George and Celine Held. Deep in the underbelly of New York City, a five year-old girl and her mother live among a community that has claimed the abandoned subway tunnels as their home.

Film descriptions are adapted from press releases. Titles highlighted in red have links to full reviews. Stay tuned in for next week’s releases! Contact us if we’ve overlooked anything.

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Margaret Barton-Fumo

Based in New York, Margaret Barton-Fumo has contributed to Film Comment since 2006. Her monthly online column, “Deep Cuts,” focused on the intersection of film and music. She has interviewed such directors, actors, and musicians as Brian De Palma, James Gray, Harry Dean Stanton, and Paul Williams, and has additionally contributed to Senses of Cinema and Stop Smiling. She is the editor of Paul Verhoeven: Interviews, published by the University Press of Mississippi.