September 2019 in Films
September has been a crazy month. I started the month in Toronto for TIFF, then I was in Austin for Fantastic Fest, and finally I’ve been in NYC for NYFF. I didn’t really get to see many films during these festivals (fun fact: when you work in the industry, you don’t get to see as many films cuz you’re working during the screenings!). I did, however, manage to get a few films watched during the month, so, as always, after the cut please find everything I watched this month plus some favorites.
August 2019 in Films
I almost made it to an average of a film a day in August. I got a little behind because the fourth season of Cable Girls dropped (it was WILD) and I started to watch a new Spanish show called 45 RPM (so far it’s great!), but I think my average for August was pretty damn good. I want to give a big shout out to KJ Relth at the UCLA Film and Television Archive for really making my summer something special with her amazing programming of female directors at the Billy Wilder Theatre. So grateful to see these thrilling films all summer, and especially to see a few of them introduced by their directors (Nina Menkes, Mary Lambert, Penelope Spheeris). As always, you can find everything I watched after the cut plus a few of my faves.
July 2019 In Films
July was another low new-to-me month for me. I blame my annual re-watch of Frasier, traveling for work, and all the rep cinema I watched (Pick up the new AGFA’s release of Sarah Jacobson’s films!!!). That said, I did see some true gems. As always, you can see everything I watch and my faves after the cut.
June 2019 in Films
June was a pretty great month in cinematic shenanigans for me, even if it was light on feature films (more on that after the cut). Halfway through the month I joined the Battleship Pretension podcast for their retrospective episode on the late Agnès Varda. I also saw a lot of really artistically challenging films (and binged a ton of soapy TV!). As always, you can see everything I watched and read a little bit about my favorites after the cut.
May 2019 in Films
May was a great month for cinema. It started with the New Beverly Cinema showcasing almost exclusively films directed by women. I guested on their podcast discussing the calendar (you can listen to it here) and went as often as I could (though I have been fighting off a bad cold and that impeding me seeing as much as I wanted). May was also filled with some great new rom-coms and I hope we keep seeing more! As always, you can see what I watched as well as some favorites after the cut.
April 2019 in Films
Apologies for the tardiness of this post. I moved into a new apartment (yay!) right before the beginning of the month, but didn’t have internet for a week (boo!). At long last I have the internet again! You will notice perhaps a wider variety than usual for April. This was due to a few factors: I had cable so I watched a bunch of films I had pointedly skipped in theaters, the TCM Classic Film Festival was a few weeks ago, and I am back in LA so I have access to so many movies! April was a very exhausting month between moving and starting a new job, but I saw quite a few gems and I’m excited to keep seeing great stuff back here in LA.
March 2019 in Films
March was a pretty crazy month for me. As you may have seen on Twitter, I announced that I left my job at TCM to take a job at Netflix. This meant closing down my apartment in Atlanta and getting set up in LA. It also meant I had a lot of time in my apartment – which led to an increased amount of viewing in March over February’s pitiful number. There were some new releases I had hoped to catch before the month ended that I did not make it to, but there’s always April! As always, after the cut you can see all the films I watched in March, as well as a handful of favorites.
Female Filmmaker Friday: The Edge of Seventeen, 2016 (dir. Kelly Fremon Craig)
When this movie came out in 2016 it was the final film directed by a woman who was going to receive a wide release. It opened opposite Fantastic Beasts, and as you can imagine it did not do all that well. It didn’t do poorly – grossing $18mil on a $9mil budget is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s also not great for a movie that opened in over 2000 theaters. It was originally scheduled for a September release, but was moved to November (possibly to help its awards chances), which I think hurt its chance to become a sleeper hit (we have so few of those these days). I had a twitter chain about the film go viral, which led to me guesting on the Filmspotting podcast, where I talked about the film, as well as my ever-growing list of films about teenager girls directed by women. (There’s a larger conversation to be had about how the conversation around Ladybird was all on how few films about teenage girls are about women when a) this film had literally been released a year earlier and b) my list is over 200 films as of writing this). I was a big fan of Hailee Steinfeld from her turn in True Grit, so I was really excited that she was finally going to get a big launch film (if only it had pushed her into the stratosphere like Easy A did for Emma Stone!)
February 2019 in Films
I really didn’t watch very many films in February. Mostly being soooo tired because of the bad weather, traveling a lot, and the fact that most movie theaters in February were still full of 2018 holdovers that I’d either already seen or didn’t want to see. That said, I did have some favorites that I watched and as always you can see those after the cut.
Female Filmmaker Friday: Få meg på, for faen! (Turn Me On, Dammit!), 2011 (dir. Jannicke Systad Jacobsen)
I remember when this film was first released in the U.S. It was when I worked at a few art house theaters in San Francisco while I was in grad school. I thought the trailer was charming, but somehow missed the film while it was in theaters. Last year I finally caught up with it thanks to the help of Videodrome here in Atlanta. It did not disappoint.
