The feature debut of Tanzanian American writer/director Ekwa Msangi, Farewell Amor, follows an immigrant family from Angola that reunites 17 years after husband and father Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) left for New York to work as a cab driver and establish a home for those he left behind. When he is finally able to bring over his wife Esther (Zainab Jah) and daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) to share his small Brooklyn apartment, expectations shatter as he realizes he is as alien to them as...

Writer/director Ekwa Msangi’s feature film debut, Farewell Amor, follows an Angolan family as they attempt to reconnect after almost two decades living on different continents. Walter (Ntare Mwine) and Esther (Zainab Jah) met and fell in love in Angola during the Civil War. While Esther and their daughter, Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), stayed as refugees in Tanzania, Walter immigrated to New York City alone to create a home for the family. When the audience meets this family, Walter is picking up Esther and Sylvia from the airport...

Rachel Brosnahan and Arinzé KeneI’m Your Woman takes well-worn crime tropes and turns them on their heads by centering typically supporting characters—the meek wife, the stoic henchman—and offering them a chance to redefine themselves. Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) is a glamorous ’70s housewife who’s sleepwalking through life until her husband Eddie brings home a baby. He doesn’t offer an explanation and Jean doesn’t press him—after all, being married to a criminal is full of surprises. But after one of Eddie’s murky deals goes south, she and...

Clea DuVall is trailblazing queer Christmas rom-coms with Happiest Season (out on Hulu November 25), a coming out story that blends traditional home-for-the-holidays romance with the emotional depth of identity and self-acceptance. DuVall proves that both can exist, breaking away from a heteronormative love story while tapping into the season's cliché sappiness. When Harper (Mackenzie Davis) invites her girlfriend Abby (Kristen Stewart) home for the holidays, she fails to mention one thing - that her family thinks Harper is straight and that Abby is her “orphan...

As Greta Thunberg sits in front of the Swedish parliament with her now-iconic sign reading “School Strike for the Climate,” an older woman approaches her. The woman isn't coming to encourage the young activist.  Instead, she chides Thunberg for striking from school and says, “If you get an education. you can affect the future. That's what you're supposed to do, you young people.” Now, almost two years after her first school strike, Thunberg is tired of hearing these words. The Hulu original documentary I Am Greta, ...

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...