Netflix will produce a modern-day remake of Jane Austen’s final novel, Persuasion. The film will star Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot, a 27-year-old single woman who, while managing her haughty family’s bankruptcy, is reacquainted with a man she was persuaded to break up with eight years prior, giving her another opportunity for love. Unexpectedly, Sex God Henry Golding, who will also star in the remake, will not be playing the main love interest, but rather Anne’s cousin, Mr. Elliot. Cosmo Jarvis is cast as Captain Frederick Wentworth,...

Love, loss, and heartache are just a few of what Frances “Franco” Stevens endures. Founder of the lesbian magazine Curve, we watch the story of Stevens and her journey to finding herself, creating the magazine, and self-acceptance. Viewers will enjoy Stevens’s authenticity and genuine personality, never bowing down to the norms of her day and overcoming adversity. Stevens first discovered her attraction to women while married to a man. This didn’t end well, ultimately leading to divorce and ostracization from her family. While job searching, she...

Movies about having babies are a little more complicated today than they once were. Frozen eggs and sperm donations; in vitro fertilization; surrogacy; nontraditional family structures; and, of course, the question of whether bringing another human into the world is even a morally responsible thing to do, have all entered the conversation. Together Together, directed by Nikole Beckwith and out digitally on May 11, dives into the more emotion-based complications that can arise during a modern pregnancy. Ed Helms stars as Matt, a single 40-something who...

  Mother’s Day might be over, but here at BUST we dont need a holiday to honor moms. If you're looking for more ways to celebrate, a great pick would be Shantrelle P. Lewis’ debut documentary In Our Mother’s Gardens. Distributed by Ava DuVernay’s Array and now available to stream on Netflix, this film is a deep exploration of the matriarchal lineages of black and brown families. It’s a multigenerational interrogation of how the legacies of those that came before us continue to live on through...

Remembering Carrie Fisher is often a hard task because, unlike most celebrities, she was a person. Her mental health and substance use struggles were tabloid fodder for years. After coming to terms with her mental health, Fisher became an activist for individuals living with substance abuse disorder and bipolar disorder. Both things are touched on in her books Wishful Drinking and The Princess Diarist. In middle school, I picked up Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher. This, as indicated by its title, is not a book for...

If watching another pre-recorded event wasn’t in the cards for you this week, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. The Independent Spirit Awards are a breath of fresh air in the pretentious chaos that is awards season. All of the nominated films had budgets under $22.5 million, a number that’s shockingly low when you consider Godzilla vs. Kong had a budget of over $155 million.  Over the years, The Independent Spirit Awards have given us more Aubrey Plaza and Laura Dern than we deserve, and I...

Though the '90s is often referred to as the Golden Age of Black cinema, men were overwhelmingly at the helm of many of the groundbreaking films that came to fruition throughout the decade. Even cult-classics such as Waiting to Exhale (1995) and Set It Off (1996), films that both celebrated and complicated our understandings of Black womanhood, were male-directed. Nonetheless, the '90s bore witness to several filmmakers like Julie Dash (Daughters Of The Dust, 1991), Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman, 1996) and Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou,...

We all love a good comeback story, don’t we? It’s a tale as old as time, and there’s a certain level of inspiration and hope that audiences can draw from the story of a person who, against all odds, manages to rise above their seemingly insurmountable circumstances. In Tina Turner’s case, however, the public’s obsession with her triumph over domestic violence has both catapulted her into mainstream success, and haunted her for a great number of years.  In what will serve as her final farewell to...

Has there ever been a more commonly visited scene in cinema than that of a funeral? The standing-over-the-casket, femme-fatale-in-a-black-netted-veil, umbrellas-shielding-the-protagonist-from-convenient-rain, religious-figure-droning-on-in-a-somber-tone image is overdone, to say the least, but writer-director Emma Seligman completely inverts this quotidien display in favor of a helter-skelter shiva in her debut film, Shiva Baby. In fact, almost this entire movie takes place at the shiva reception, inside a cramped home filled to the brim with rambunctious guests. At only 25 years old, Seligman makes a cinematic splash with Shiva Baby, a...

As the documentary Hysterical begins, neon signs flash over photos of comedians when they were young girls. The signs read: "BE PRETTY. BE SOFT-SPOKEN. DON’T BE BOSSY. BE NICE. DON’T BE MESSY. SMILE." While these expectations tend to be ingrained in the brains of girls and women from birth to death, some of them are counterintuitive to a life in comedy. How can a comedian make people laugh without a bit of bite and a bit of mess?  Hysterical, which premieres on FX on April 2, considers...