The full list of Oscar nominees was announced this morning, and there’s a lot of good and bad things to say about them. Unsurprisingly, La La Land swept with 14 nominations, because white people in Hollywood love movies about white people in Hollywood. But the other subject making headlines today is just how many nominations there are for people of color: Moonlight received 8 nominations, while Fences received 4 and Hidden Figures received 3. Here they are: Ruth Negga (Loving) for Best ActressDenzel Washington (Fences) for...

Spoiler Alert: Yeah, he did. I just wanted to see a movie with my girlfriend. I was looking for ninety-plus minutes to escape the realities of our recent presidential election and enjoy an American pastime with a side of greasy popcorn. What I did not want, let alone expect, as I sat down to view Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals was one hour and 57 minutes of squirming in my seat and continuous reminders of the violence and stigma attached to my identified gender. Don’t get me wrong....

  MA is beautifully surreal experimental film written, directed and performed by choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall (Pantsuit Nation Flash Mob, GIRLS) that uses gesture and image (no dialogue) to tell the story of one woman’s traumatic pilgrimage of self discovery. Rowlson-Hall invents her very own deeply personal visual language through movement, iconic imagery, and a haunting score (by Brian McOmber) creating a moving and original experience. Think The Virgin Mary goes on a road trip to Las Vegas. At times, the movie feels like a dream, at...

(Rogue One spoilers follow, obviously.) There are countless reviews of Gareth Edwards’ first of the Star Wars anthology films, all variations on comparing it to this Episode or that; but its solitary focus makes for a tale set apart. As the lost piece of an intricate puzzle, Rogue One satisfyingly presses into its rightful place in the series’ universe. Filling in that blank space might never have seemed necessary, but, once you’ve seen it, there’s no denying the richness added. Like a secret ingredient playing up...

While I would have been happy with Michelle MacLaren in the driver’s seat for Wonder Woman, I’m not going to sneeze at the studio hiring a woman to replace her. And that woman is Patty Jenkins. Before she was going to brave the studio gauntlet to make a film version of the woman with a magic lasso, Jenkins made a little feature film called Monster. Jenkins, who enjoys both true crime and comedy, grew up on military bases all over the globe, where she became a...

Anastasia Cazabon undoubtedly understands the plight and hard-won triumphs of women in the film industry. Though her name is not associated with big budget umbrellas such as Sony or 20th Century Fox, her progression in the independent film circuit hasn't been without the overwhelming feeling that women voices were limited or, worse, excluded in the art of filmmaking. “I had gone to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and I would say that there were 5 women to every man. So how was it...

As a child, Jennifer Kent says she put on her first play at age seven. She wrote stories and in her late teens, chose acting as her career path. As an adult, Kent enjoys visceral cinema. “I like films where I’m forced to feel something. I want to be put through something.” After an acting career with roles in Australian TV series like Murder Call and All Saints, she grew bored telling other people’s stories and decided to go back to writing her own. “Writing was...

If you’ve gone to a movie in the past few months, you’ve probably seen the trailer for the movie Passengers, which is being marketed as a romance set in space. Chris Pratt’s character and Jennifer Lawrence’s character are in suspended animation in a rocketship on their way to a new planet when they wake up early and proceed to fall in love and save the day. However, there’s a twist: Pratt’s character wakes up first, and then decides to force Lawrence’s character out of her suspended animation...

It’s official: Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, the coming-of-age YA novel about “not-so-openly gay” teenager Simon Spier, is going to be a movie. And needless to say, I am EXCITED. 2016 was a hard year, especially for the LGBTQ+ community, and the lack of representation for LGBTQ+ people in media hasn’t made it any better. A study by GLAAD, an organization dedicated to promoting acceptance of LGTBQ+ people, showed that only 17.5% of movies had LGBTQ+ characters in 2015. Of that percent, only half contained...

Only a movie that is autobiographical could be so compassionate in depicting the protagonist screaming at the medicine aisle in a grocery store because he can’t find laxatives. Chris Kelly’s Other People, which is currently streaming on Netflix, is such a film — empathetic, drily humorous, and based in part on his own life. Starring Jesse Plemons, Molly Shannon, and Bradley Whitford, Other People tells the story of the Mulcahey family and how their son, David (Plemons), must come to terms with his mother Joanne’s...