Female Film Critics 24/375
Steven Soderbergh turns a transatlantic crossing into three talented actresses in search of a script. Mercurial, manipulative Alice Hughes (Meryl Streep) is an acclaimed author who journeys to London to receive a prestigious literary award. Since she doesn’t fly, she’s booked on Cunard’s luxurious Queen Mary II and allowed to invite several guests to accompany her.
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Luis Manuel is a well-known Latin activist, an unstoppable force of change. Mid-way through his busy life in art and politics, one of his children produced a little show called Hamilton, and suddenly his name changed from Luis to ‘Lin Manuel Miranda’s Father.’ And, he didn’t mind at all.
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Anyone who has followed Paul Rudnick’s career and appreciates it knows to keep following, nuisance-close lest missing a word. The Coastal Elites outshines his every other brilliance. It expands upon what it means to manage these agonizing days with heart and soul, laughter and vinegar.
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David France’s documentary Welcome to Chechnya makes painfully clear that brutal, state-sanctioned oppression still exists in this autonomous Russian region where LGBTQ individuals suffer beatings, long-term imprisonment with accompanying torture, and vicious, unpunished killings. President since 1917 Ramzan Kadyrov has initiated and supported such action.
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Bad Education tells well the true story of a bad principal. Frank Tassone is one of those principals who knows each student’s name — and probably what his history project is or what sport she plays. He is compassionate, considerate, competent. He also harbors a secret worth millions.
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The Black Panther dream team of Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira are reuniting on HBO Max. The pair’s planned adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah has earned a straight-to-series order at the upcoming streaming service.
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Andrea Arnold’s career shows what a woman filmmaker’s ‘can do spirit’ can do. The career path she’s created for herself has brought her from the difficult circumstances of a child raised in a single parent home in the environs of a working class ‘estate’ in suburban London to the coveted and exalted position of series director for a highly acclaimed and high ranking television series. Along the way, she’s won an Oscar and become an OBE, and accrued numerous other awards and honors for her femme-centric films. Arnold’s filmography is stunning in its inventiveness and variety, but it is her exceptional leadership as director of HBO’S Big Little Lies Season Two, which began airing in June that puts her in AWFJ’s July SPOTLIGHT.
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As far as I know, there will be two seasons of Homecoming, so it is still possible that this wonderfully innovative beginning will collapse into a formulaic conclusion in the next season, marooning us in the older thriller world of simplistic right and wrong. (I hope not.) But the series thus far is so tantalizing that a discussion of the way it touches on current anxieties and blind spots in contemporary America is not premature.
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Six-time Academy Award-nominated actor Amy Adams and her manager Stacy O’Neil are launching a new production company called Bond Group Entertainment. The fledgling company has secured a first-look deal at HBO.
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Naomi Watts is the first performer been cast in the as-yet-untitled prequel to the HBO smash Game of Thrones. The two-time Oscar nominated actress will play a character described as “a charismatic socialite hiding a dark secret” in the prequel scripted bu Jane Goldmam and George R.R. Martin. The project is expected to begin filming in early 2019.
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