Film

Was Mary Oliver a Feminist? 

PUBLISHED 8/29/2026 by

From Pinterest boards to classroom walls, Mary Oliver’s words have become popular in a way that most poets could only dream. People have even gone as far as to call her “Saint Mary.”

But in a new documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, director and producer Sasha Waters presents Oliver with complexity, hoping that more people will read her poetry with the poet behind it in mind.

“I think there’s also this way in which she becomes a little flattened and one-dimensional through the way that she circulates now,” says Waters. “Understanding that she was very much a complicated person and woman until the end of her life is what I hope people take away from her.”

Madonna Is Still Rewriting the Rules For Women in Pop

PUBLISHED 8/18/2026 by

Thousands of fans, writers, nightlife legends and artists walked between the legs of a towering inflatable Madonna last month—a fitting monument to four decades of Madonna’s subversive expression of female sexuality and autonomy. The giant inflatable served as the entrance to Club Confessions at the Knockdown Center, where she celebrated Confessions II, her 15th studio album and sequel to her landmark 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor.

The event followed a summer in which Madonna staged a surprise album launch performance in Times Square; joined Sabrina Carpenter onstage during Carpenter’s headlining Coachella set; and opened the first-ever FIFA World Cup Final halftime show.

Widely regarded as a pioneering voice of women’s sexuality, authorship and autonomy in entertainment, Madonna has paved the way for generations of artists since the 1980s. But the industry moves at a relentless pace, with artists becoming irrelevant after a single album cycle and women in particular expected to endlessly reinvent themselves to remain culturally valuable. Against that backdrop, her newest work radically celebrates her own legacy.

Forty-three years after releasing her debut single, Madonna has fundamentally expanded the possibilities of female autonomy.

The Feminist Case for Loving ‘Charlie’s Angels’

PUBLISHED 8/8/2026 by

I don’t remember how old I was when I first heard the term “jiggle TV,” but I know it was decades after I was a devoted, starry-eyed fangirl of the genre. And I do mean “girl”—Wonder Woman came into the world just a year after I did, Charlie’s Angels two years after, Three’s Company the year after that. I watched them all—first in weekly nighttime installments, later in endlessly imbibable reruns—as I was learning to walk, talk, dress, eat, interact with other girls and other boys, and understand how the world saw me and where I fit into it.

The term “jiggle TV” was coined in the mid-1970s by NBC exec Paul Klein to describe and deride rival network ABC’s successful lineup of shows starring women who wore excessively revealing clothing, with Charlie’s Angels as its prime example. Whatever age I was when I first heard the term, I was old enough to immediately grasp its demeaning, objectifying implications. I remember it hitting me like a ton of bricks: The fictional world I’d been gazing at with such awe and reverence was, in the eyes of others, somewhere between a turn-on and a joke.

Without making a big thing about it, I tucked my childhood obsession away in a remote-storage corner of my brain and, for decades, lived an Angels-free life.

Until this year, when Charlie’s Angels turned the big 5-0.

I decided to attempt a full-series rewatch. I wanted to see if immersing myself in the series again after all these years would pull my memories out of remote storage and give me a more detailed picture of how the show’s storylines and messages had affected my pliable young mind.

What had I picked up and taken away from the show besides starry-eyed fangirl devotion?

The answer was: plenty.

On the Voting Rights Act’s Anniversary, Short Film ‘Selma Sisters March On’ Captures 1965’s Fight for the Right to Vote

PUBLISHED 8/6/2026 by

Aug. 6, 2026, marks the 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, the VRA sought to end Jim Crow-era voter disenfranchisement. Particularly in Southern states, voting officials routinely required Black voters to jump through hoops such as “literacy tests” or arbitrary rules such as having to name every county in the state before voting. Even if a Black voter managed to make it this far, election administrators sometimes intentionally sent them to the wrong location to vote, ensuring their vote never actually got counted.

The Voting Rights Act made it illegal for states to discriminate against voters by race, color or language-minority status, thereby reaffirming all U.S. citizens’ constitutional right to vote. The VRA also introduced additional changes to make voting more widely accessible, such as ballots in languages other than English and protections for blind, disabled and illiterate voters.

However, the VRA only became law after decades of struggle and widespread civil rights protests, including the famous marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in March 1965. Protesters, many of whom were young students, faced violent attacks from law enforcement, from tear gas to imprisonment, as they fought for their right to vote.

Sisters Alice and Denise Thomas were only 16 and 14 when they joined the Selma to Montgomery marches and other protests in their home state of Alabama before the VRA became law. In the new short documentary Selma Sisters March On, the Thomas sisters describe in their own words the fateful events of 1965 as they experienced them as high school-aged civil-rights activists.

What a ‘Black Helen of Troy’ Reveals About Hollywood and Mythmaking

PUBLISHED 8/5/2026 by

The conversations over a Black actor like Lupita Nyong’o portraying the iconic Helen of Troy, “the most beautiful woman in the world”, reveal a broader discomfort with depictions of dark-skinned Black beauty in Hollywood.

Whether Nolan intended to or not, Nyong’o’s dual roles reinforced the white feminine ideal, since her Helen does not threaten whiteness as the beauty status quo, nor does her Clytemnestra establish her as sufficiently feminine. 

Writer Karen Attiah argues we don’t need a Black Helen so much as we need more “Black mythologies. … “We don’t need Black Helens of Troy. We need more Wakanda women. We need more Women Kings. We need more Queens of Katwe. It is precisely in this moment of historical erasure and rejection of even the most nominal forms of Black inclusion that Black writers and thinkers, and especially Black women, should be focusing on building out the civilizational myths, histories, and heroines we already have.”

Imagine an epic movie about Amanirenas, the Kandake queen who prevented the conquest of the ancient kingdom of Kush from the powerful Roman army circa 25 B.C.E.

Or Queen Nzinga, who fought against the Portuguese seeking to enslave her people during the transatlantic slave trade era circa 1600s.

We can hardly visualize the kingdom of Haiti in existence between 1811 and 1820 during the era of Bridgerton, as historian Marlene Daut argues, let alone tell the story of its king and queen (instead of reclaiming the British Queen Charlotte as a Black royal). 

Imagine Lupita Nyong’o cast in any of these majestic roles.

And these roles need not be historical. Imagine the same actor reprising her role as the spy “war dog” Nakia from the Black Panther franchise in her own movie spin-off, traipsing James-Bond style around the world without the need to replace James Bond himself. 

If we must wait until 2028 to witness Nyong’o on our big screens again (when the third Black Panther film is scheduled), then this moment in The Odyssey is a misuse of her talents.

Inspired by the Greek Myth, Independent Film Series ‘The Cassandra Project’ Asks Viewers to Believe Women

PUBLISHED 7/26/2026 by

Even in the wake of the #MeToo movement and heighteend awareness around sexual vioelnce, sexual assault is still one of the most underreported crimes. Although one in four women will experience sexual violence in her lifetime, fewer than 5 percent of these cases ever get reported to the police. In many situations, women fear that the police won’t believe them.

Unfortunately, this fear is well founded. Even though so few reports of sexual assault make it to the police in the first place, data shows that law enforcement will determine that one in five reported cases is “unfounded” and dismiss it.

There are dire consequences to not believing women. The Cassandra Project, a new trilogy of independent short films spearheaded by filmmaker Barclay DeVeau, hopes to illustrate “the profound consequences that arise when women are not believed and their voices are disregarded and dismissed.”

Documentary ‘State of Firsts’ Follows Sarah McBride’s Historic Journey to Congress

PUBLISHED 7/22/2026 by

A new documentary, State of Firsts, released during Pride Month, chronicles Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.)’s historic path to Congress amid growing anti-transgender rhetoric. It is now showing in select theaters across the country.

Directed by trans filmmaker Chase Joynt, the documentary offers a behind-the-scenes look at McBride’s journey to becoming the first openly transgender elected official in the U.S. Congress.

What Happens When a Dancer Is Forced to Become a Refugee? ‘Born to Dance, Forced to Run’ Captures Life Under the Shadow of Deportation

PUBLISHED 7/22/2026 by

Born to Dance, Forced to Run is a powerful new documentary that follows Steeven Labady, a queer Haitian dancer whose relentless pursuit of his artistic dreams is continually upended by displacement, asylum battles and the constant threat of deportation. Through his extraordinary journey, filmmaker and Haitian feminist activist Pascale Solages reveals the human cost of migration policies, transforming an abstract political debate into an intimate story of resilience, survival and hope.

At a moment when the Trump administration is dismantling Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and escalating immigration enforcement, the film’s message could not be more urgent. It’s a deeply human portrait of what it means to live undocumented under the shadow of deportation.

Born to Dance, Forced to Run premieres in New York on Saturday, July 25, at 6 p.m. at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, where audiences will have an opportunity to experience this moving documentary on the big screen, followed by a Q&A.

Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ Reclaims the Diversity of the Ancient World

PUBLISHED 7/21/2026 by

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey validates the culture through this quarter-billion-dollar Hollywood production—best seen and appreciated in movie theaters. So, why did some react to this latest retelling of The Odyssey as if the mere presence of a Black woman would delegitimize its place in history? And should we ignore them as out-of-touch fringe extremists? 

Before The Odyssey even reached theaters, Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy ignited predictable outrage from white supremacists and anti-“woke” commentators who claimed a Black actor had no place in one of Western civilization’s foundational myths. But as scholars of antiquity make clear, that backlash says far more about modern racial politics than it does about the ancient world itself.

Nolan’s sweeping adaptation arrives at a moment when the fight over history is also a fight over power. By embracing a multiracial cast, The Odyssey challenges centuries of whitewashing and reminds us that the ancient Mediterranean was far more diverse than many have been taught to believe.

The diversity of the ancient world is our collective heritage—not the exclusive property of those seeking to rewrite the past.

‘Obsession’ and the Rise of Incel Horror: When Men’s Entitlement Becomes the Monster

PUBLISHED 6/4/2026 by

When I first watched Curry Barker’s Obsession, I assumed the horror was obvious. Not the supernatural curse at the center of the film but the decision that sets it in motion: a man deciding he is entitled to a woman’s love, to a woman’s body, regardless of her consent. 

Online, women have begun calling this kind of story “incel horror.” Particularly on TikTok, women for the first time are naming a terrifying and longstanding element in horror films often left unsaid. The real nightmare being the expectation that men depicted as the hero or the victim believe they are owed the bodies of the women in the story. As one TikToker shares, women’s reinterpretation of past films and casting a new light on modern films like Obsession (2026) through a feminist lens is going to change the future of cinema. 

In Barker’s film, it wasn’t the occult magic in the “One Wish Willow” toy that caused Bear to “control” Nikki—it was Bear’s belief that it was okay for him to make this wish in the first place. Barker places the central threat within Nikki who becomes obsessed with Bear and kills several of their friends. Conversely, feminists recognize that it’s Bear’s expectation that he is owed her affection and that he is right to use a supernatural entity to gain it, as the true horror.