Mary Anning made her first discovery in 1811 at 12 years old, when her brother, Joseph, found a fossilized skull on the beaches of their seaside town of Lyme Regis in West Dorset, England. Over several months, Mary unearthed the near-complete skeleton of a marine reptile called an ichthyosaur. The death of Mary’s father, a cabinetmaker and fossil collector, left her family burdened with debt; the ichthyosaur had to be sold. Henry Henley, a local lord, bought it from the Annings for £23 and Mary’s...

Clea DuVall’s Happiest Season, starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis, is pushing right past the stringent boundaries of the traditional holiday love story. In the trailer, out now, Abby (Stewart) is excited to meet her girlfriend, Harper's (Davis) family — but upon their arrival, Harper reveals that she has yet to come out, asking Abby to play her "orphan roommate." The scheme sends the two of them down a series of hilarious hurdles as they navigate Harper's concealed home life identity, the complexities of coming out, and...

The earth, the sun and all the surrounding planets exist in the Milky Way Galaxy, an easy thing to say but an almost impossible thing to understand. Proxima is the nearest galaxy to us, more than 20 trillion miles away, an incomprehensible distance. “Proxima is the galaxy closest to us and yet it is still so far away much like the emotional relationship between a mother and daughter.” says Alice Winocour, the director of a new movie named after the galaxy. Her film, distributed by Pathé, is...

I first encountered Alfred Hitchcock’s original Rebecca in an undergraduate class that revolved around his films. Much of this class was particularly concerned with the women in Hitchcock’s films: his preoccupation with blondes, his use of homoerotic tension, and his treatment of his leading ladies came up in our discussions and readings often. Hitchcock’s treatment of actress Jean Fontaine, the leading lady of Rebecca, emerged to me as particularly noteworthy.  During their time filming, Hitchcock reportedly bullied Fontaine into believing that the cast and crew despised...

Content Warning: Brief mention of suicide  “Half of the battle of having powers is believing you do.” For the four young witches in The Craft: Legacy, winning this battle means finding empowerment and sisterhood among their magic spells. The stand-alone sequel of the 1996 The Craft amps up the coming-of-age drama and loses the gimmicky (but loved) aesthetic choices. Zoe Lister-Jones wrote and directed the film, working with the old material to create a new coven. The sisterhood, made up of Frankie, Lily, Tabby, and Lourdes...

Halloween is usually filled with children prancing around the neighborhood before dusk and 35-year old men in Jim from The Office costumes lumbering around drunkenly. But, this year we won’t have to worry about getting candy for these trick-or-treaters or fighting off the advances of many uncharismatic Jims. Instead, we can really indulge in all that Halloween movies have to offer. Here are 12 spooky movies you can watch now curated for every mood:  If you're all about the classics: Halloween (1978) is the quintessential spooky holiday movie that...

If you're a millennial of a certain age, it’s possible you’ve been lusting after Joseph Gordon-Levitt for basically your whole life. From grade-school sleepovers in the late ’90s (10 Things I Hate About You) to date nights in the aughts (500 Days of Summer) to Oscar prepping in the 2010s (Inception), he’s always been there, upstaging higher-profile heart throbs in every genre. So, it is with great pleasure that I report he is every bit as charming as you’d want him to be, even on a...

In one of the first scenes of “Lady Liberty,” Shea (Julia Lindon) awkwardly comes out to her gynecologist, who is painfully unprepared for the news. Shea saying “no penis” to indicate that her sexual partner doesn’t need to be using condoms is perhaps the funniest line of the whole short film. Lindon, who plays the main character, is also the writer and producer of the short, which premiered at Tribeca TV last year.  Unfortunately for her, this scene was mined from Lindon’s own experience at a...

A coming of age story meets The Smiths' fandom of the '80s in The More You Ignore Me. This film weaves Morrissey's legacy into the befuddled homelife of Alice (Ella Hunt), her loyal father, Keith (Mark Addy), and mentally disabled mother, Gina (Sheridan Smith) in rural England. The film is an adaptation of Jo Brand's darkly comic novel. Yet, beneath Brand's comedic writing, The More You Ignore Me tackles difficult themes like mental illness and loss as Alice is bent between her devotion to her...

Content warning: The following Q&A as well as the film included contains discussion of sexual and physical abuse.  In the short film Garden of Ants, by Jenni Hensler, a young woman exists in two warring realities, one in innocence and the other in the throngs of an abusive relationship. The film is an abstract reflection of Hensler’s personal experiences with abuse and how she continues to work through its effects on her relationships. Hensler is a freelance creative director, stylist and filmmaker who has produced art...