Female Film Critics 24/375
In 1917, the doughboys fighting the Great War still thought they’d be home by Christmas. The film “1917” tells the story of two of those soldiers, Lieutenants Blake and Scofield. They are assigned an impossible task, one that makes the goal of “Saving Private Ryan” seem like tiddlywinks.
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Directed by Jay Roach (HBO’s “Game Change”), there’s a cheeky playfulness to the film that’s unneeded, borderline offensive and counterintuitive. Even the movie’s title seems to winkingly marvel that a group of beautiful blondes – which was basically a requirement for a woman working at Fox News – brought down Ailes, undermining both what they suffered in his allegedly toxic workplace and what they risked in speaking out.
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It is to the briny depths that Irish filmmaker Neasa Hardiman turns for her feature debut, Sea Fever. A stalwart and highly experienced television director, as both writer and director Hardiman demonstrates a steady hand as she captains the film throughout what in generic terms is thrilling yet rather pedestrian ocean-monster science fiction territory.
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One of the hardest parts of watching “Bombshell” is telling the women apart. Fox News hired svelte blonde women, and the film’s make-up department, headed by Vivian Baker, made the actresses uncannily resemble the newscasters. Harder, however, is watching the sexual harassment unfold in the network culture of Fox news (“news” used advisedly).
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Beloved by generations of female readers, Alcott’s tale of four sisters growing up in genteel poverty in 1860s Massachusetts remains one of the few American literary classics penned by a woman. Published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869, it unfurled the lives of the March girls in chronological order, starting with their teen years into their becoming “Little Women.”
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In 2014, Stevenson wrote Just Mercy, which recounts the beginning of the Equal Justice Initiative, similar to the Innocence Project and the Midwest Innocence Project. Stevenson’s book has become a most respectable film, the kind that forces a sob to rise from the heart at the end as captions explain what happened after the last scene fades to black.
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Have you heard of Anne Innis Dagg? The answer is probably not, and people around the world should know her. Writer/director Alison Reid’s The Woman Who Loves Giraffes shines a spotlight on Dagg, a Canadian who traveled to Africa alone in the 50s to do some of the first studying ever of animals in their own habitat.
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There is a palpable anger at patriarchal institutions that bleeds from Catherine S. McMullen’s pen as much as it does through Szumowska’s camera as they unpack the precise mechanics of dominance and submission, and how such abuses can become naturalized and institutionalized until stepping back and asking ‘why?’ becomes a radical act in its own right.
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Lions and tigers seem like big house cats, at least at a distance. Elephants are portrayed as majestic beasts. And apes, well, they are our evolutionary cousins. But with their high-rise stature, fashionably patterned fur and head horns, giraffes have been perhaps a less relatable creature to the human race. But as the title of Alison Reid’s enlightening documentary reveals, there indeed was The Woman Who Loved Giraffes.
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“The Kingmaker” starts as a captivating portrait of a woman who can with a straight face refer to her family’s plundering of billions of Filipino tax dollars to finance their luxurious lifestyle as a way of “mothering” the country. But the film soon becomes an absolutely chilling account of how the once-exiled Marcos and her adult children have returned to the Philippines and started to steadily rebuild their political dynasty.
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