Hustlers spoilers ahead. Hustlers is just as thrilling as it might sound, starring Jennifer Lopez, Constance Wu, and others as a group of strippers who are hustling for their money – then, ultimately, hustling others. Lorene Scafaria wrote the screenplay based off a true story, and the group acts like a squad of modern day "feminist Robin Hoods," stealing money from the rich men who visit their strip club. The film takes a pretty dark turn when that hustle has the women caught up in a dangerous scheme that involves...

Share premiered at Sundance and making its way to Cannes before finding a home with HBO for distribution. Pippa Bianco’s debut feature Share illuminates rethinking what justice means for sexual assault victims. Bianco’s film takes a realistic approach to the experience of sexual assault victims and everyone else involved. Share is not too focused on the horror of sexual assault, but more so on the numbness, shame, and isolation left in it’s wake. In the film, we meet Mandy Lundy (played by Rhianne Barreto) confused as...

VITA & VIRGINIAWritten and directed by Chanya ButtonOut August 23 It’s surprising that, until now, there hasn’t been a movie about the love story between writers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. But writer/director Chanya Button’s Vita & Virginia is worth the wait. Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) is a high-society novelist, married to a diplomat and infamous for her relationships with women and refusal to conform to early-20th-century ideas of what a female aristocrat should be. She’s instantly drawn to guarded literary genius Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki), and when...

Olivia Wilde, as the source of beauty and wit she is, has already given us so much with her directorial masterpiece from earlier this year, Booksmart. And yet, she has imparted even more of her wisdom unto us, highlighting the fault in the way female-run comedy is often covered. In a recent interview with Yahoo Entertainment, when asked about the common comparison to the male-dominated 2007 comedy Superbad and Booksmart, Wilde commented, “I mean, hopefully, we get to a point where every female movie doesn’t...

Kristen Stewart, a figure often made into a caricature or an impression to the public, is now opening up about the constraints put on her career and sexuality by the public. Most notably in her latest interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Stewart talked about how she has been advised to hide her sexual fluidity to further her career saying, “I have fully been told, 'If you just like do yourself a favour, and don’t go out holding your girlfriend’s hand in public, you might get a...

The best one-sentence description of The Art of Self-Defense I have managed to conjure up is “Fight Club, but directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.” It takes place in a completely generic 1990s-era town, where the dog food in the grocery store is literally labeled a brandless “Dog Food,” where the protagonist’s home answering machine informs him that he has “only” one new message, while a news anchor blithely recommends protecting oneself with a gun or large knife while out in public. The Art of Self-Defense pulls no punches. (There’s the...

  Lulu Wang’s second feature The Farewell is also the second version of the story that Wang deems as “based on a true lie." The plotline of The Farewell brings Wang’s real life to the silver screen where she is faced with keeping quiet about her grandmother Nai Nai’s terminal illness diagnosis. Wang initially told this story on NPR’s “This American Life” podcast, the episode was titled “What You Don’t Know” where Wang and her family members help narrate and share their feelings about the lie....

One Child Nation is a beautifully made, and at moments deeply disturbing, eye-opening documentary by Nanfu Wang about the one-child policy that lasted for over 30 years in China. In the film, Wang sets out to capture the hidden, more raw and personal side of the policy by listening to the stories of people that lived it. She travels to her hometown in Jiangxi Province where she speaks with family members, neighbors, and even a retired village official that was involved with enforcing the policy. She...

The Nightingale  Written and directed by Jennifer Kent  Out August 2      Jennifer Kent’s directorial debut, The Babadook, won countless accolades in 2014, and in her long-awaited follow-up, Kent’s protagonists face an even more terrifying monster. Set in 1825, The Nightingale opens on Clare (Aisling Franciosi), an Irish prisoner serving time in Tasmania. When her husband attempts to free her from her abusive captor, Clare is graphically gang-raped by British soldiers in front of him and her child, both of whom are brutally murdered immediately...

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am Directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders Out June 21  This documentary delivers an intimate look at the life of renowned writer Toni Morrison. It also sheds light on Chloe Wofford—the woman she was before taking on her pen name—definitively separating the artist from the woman, the mother, the editor, and the teacher. Accompanied by luminaries including Angela Davis, Sonia Sanchez, and Oprah Winfrey, Morrison recounts her experiences navigating the predominately white literary establishment and ultimately expanding it. Refusing to shrink, she challenged both writers and...