New Shows + Movies by Women — March 11, 2022

There’s a lot to get into, so let’s dive right in this week. New series come from France, Japan, Romania, the U.K., and the U.S., while new movies come from the Czech Republic, Poland, and the U.S.

NEW SERIES

Shining Vale (Starz)
co-showrunner Sharon Horgan

Courteney Cox and Greg Kinnear star in a fantasy comedy about a family that moves into an old home known for its horrible past. Things get stranger and stranger, but the only one who seems to notice is Cox’s Pat, who suspects she might be possessed.

Sharon Horgan created and showruns “Shining Vale” with Jeff Astrof. An Irish actress and writer who became involved in BBC productions, she produced, wrote, and starred in “Catastrophe” and “Pulling”.

You can watch “Shining Vale” on Starz. The first two episodes are out now, with new ones dropping every Sunday.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (Apple TV)
half-directed by women

Samuel L. Jackson plays an elderly man with dementia. He has one last chance to remember his past and investigate the death of his nephew. The series is based on the novel by Walter Mosley.

Hanelle M. Culpepper (“Star Trek: Picard”, “Gotham”) directs 2 episodes, and Debbie Allen (“Everybody Hates Chris”, “Scandal”) directs one.

You can watch “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey” on Apple TV. The first episode is available now, and new episodes arrive on Fridays.

The Thing About Pam (NBC)
showrunner Jenny Klein

Renee Zellweger stars as Pam Hupp in a comedy adaptation of a recent murder. Hupp was initially successful in framing someone else for the crime. Judy Greer and Josh Duhamel co-star.

Showrunner Jenny Klein has written on “Supernatural” and produced on “The Witcher” and “Cloak & Dagger”.

You can watch “The Thing About Pam” on NBC or Hulu. The premiere is available now, with new episodes on Tuesdays.

Ruxx (HBO Max)
showrunner Vera Ion
mostly directed by Iulia Rugina

Can’t find a translated trailer for this Romanian romantic dramedy. It follows Ruxx, who’s navigating political work, family, and romantic life, as well as the toxicity and misogyny that enters into each.

Showrunner and writer Vera Ion is a Romanian playwright. Iulia Rugina directs six of the eight episodes, and she’s already seen two feature films and two short films nominated in the Gopos Awards, Romania’s equivalent to our Oscars.

You can watch “Ruxx” on HBO Max. Three episodes are available now, with a new one dropping every Tuesday.

The Chelsea Detective (Acorn TV)
half-directed by Darcia Martin

Two detectives investigate the elite of London’s Chelsea neighborhood in a new four-episode series. As is the case with many British mysteries, each episode lasts around an hour-and-a-half.

Darcia Martin directs two episodes. She’s directed on “Shakespeare & Hathaway” and “Father Brown”.

You can watch “The Chelsea Detective” on Acorn TV. The first mystery is available, with a new one debuting every Monday.

Weekend Family (Disney+)
half-directed by Sophie Reine

Emmanuelle is an academic who falls for a man with three children. Each has a different mother who’s very involved in their lives, and the entire family gets together every weekend. Emmanuelle learns how to navigate the situation over the course of eight episodes. This is Disney+’s first original series in French.

Sophie Reine shares directing duties with Pierre-Francois Martin-Laval, at four episodes apiece. Reine is a prolific editor of French film. She edited “The Connection” and won a Cesar award (France’s Oscar equivalent) for her editing on “The First Day of the Rest of Your Life”. She was also nominated for Best First Film for her “Cigarettes et chocolat chaud”.

Disclosure: I know Emmanuelle’s voice-over artist on the English dub, Jessie Hendricks.

You can watch “Weekend Family” on Disney+. All 10 episodes are available immediately.

Kotaro Lives Alone (Netflix)
directed by Makino Tomoe

In this anime, a manga artist who’s become unpopular finds himself caring for a 5 year-old child who lives alone.

Makino Tomoe directed her first series last year with “Woodpecker Detective’s Office”. She’s worked her way through key animation, storyboard, and episode direction jobs on various anime.

You can watch “Kotaro Lives Alone” on Netflix. All 10 episodes are available now.

NEW MOVIES

Turning Red (Disney+)
directed by Domee Shi

In Pixar’s latest film, Mei Lee is a 13 year-old girl who’s struggling through adolescence. Making things more complicated is the fact that whenever she gets excited, she turns into a giant red panda. Aside from Rosalie Chiang as Mei Lee, the voice cast also includes Sandra Oh, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Orion Lee, and James Hong.

Director and co-writer Domee Shi won an Oscar for Best Animated Short with “Bao”. She’s also been a storyboard artist on “Inside Out”, “Incredibles 2”, and “Toy Story 4”.

You can watch “Turning Red” on Disney+.

Mainstream (Showtime)
directed by Gia Coppola

Andrew Garfield stars as a major social media influencer who builds his brand off impostor syndrome. Those around him participate in an organized, insincere chaos, less and less sure if they’re the parts they play or the people lost in them.

Director and co-writer Gia Coppola is the niece of Sofia Coppola and granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola. This is her second feature after 2013’s “Palo Alto”. She’s also directed music videos for Carly Rae Jepsen and Blood Orange.

You can watch “Mainstream” on Showtime, or see where to rent it.

India Sweets and Spices (Hulu)
directed by Geeta Malik

Alia returns from college during the summer, only to find her parents’ past secrets are disrupting the family she thought she knew.

This is the second feature from writer-director Geeta Malik after the well-regarded “Troublemaker”. She started out in the industry as a grip and assistant camera, in between making short films.

You can watch “India Sweets and Spices” on Hulu, or see where to rent it.

Even Mice Belong in Heaven (Tubi)
co-directed by Denisa Grimmova

In this Czech stop-motion animated film, a mouse and fox meet in animal heaven. They become friends, only to be reborn into opposite roles.

Denisa Grimmova directs with Jan Bubenicek. This is her first feature film.

You can watch “Even Mice Belong in Heaven” on Tubi, or see where to rent it.

Autumn Girl (Netflix)
showrunner Katarzyna Klimkiewicz

This Polish drama follows Kalina Jedrusik. The singer and actress came to symbolize women’s sexual freedom and independence in the 1960s.

Katarzyna Klimkiewicz directs and co-writes the series. She won a European Film Award for her short “Hanoi-Warszawa” in 2009.

You can watch “Autumn Girl” on Netflix.

Mark, Mary & Some Other People (Hulu)
directed by Hannah Marks

Newlyweds give non-monogamy a try in order to stabilize their relationship.

Writer-director Hannah Marks is better known as an actress in “Necessary Roughness” and “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”. However, she’s also written “Banana Split”, and wrote and directed “After Everything”.

This was previously featured, but you can now watch “Mark, Mary & Some Other People” on Hulu, or see where to rent it.

Take a look at new shows + movies by women from past weeks.

If you enjoy what you read on this site, subscribe to Gabriel Valdez’s Patreon. It helps with the time and resources to continue writing articles like this one.

One of the Ugliest Films I’ve Ever Seen — “Kingsman: The Secret Service”

by Gabriel Valdez

Look, the review section is going to address the middling craft and storytelling behind this film. Then the Bechdel section is going to rip the utter bejesus out of everything that’s left. Just be warned:

Kingsman: The Secret Service is a movie that has no idea what it wants to be. It follows Eggsy (Taron Egerton), a young Englander who grows up without a father. His dad sacrificed himself for his team on the kind of mission that James Bond makes his bread and butter, and Eggsy wears a medal around his neck he can never show to anyone else. Eggsy’s life consists of getting into trouble and watching out for his mom, who doesn’t have the best choice in boyfriends.

Eggsy is whisked off to a spy school in much the same way Harry Potter is taken to Hogwarts. The first half of Kingsman is as solid as you could ask for, alternating between Eggsy’s training and a mission to save the world being carried out by his sponsor Harry (Colin Firth).

Inevitably, Eggsy is drawn into the mission itself, which pits his team against a villain named Valentine who’s so upset global warming will destroy humankind that he decides to, um, destroy humankind. Just take that kind of logic on faith – the villain’s played by Samuel L. Jackson, who seems to be the only one aware of what a cheeseball movie he’s actually in.

These sorts of plots are also where the film starts to come apart. When a writer (Jane Goldman) and director (Matthew Vaughn) are so obsessed with pushing a political agenda that it shoves everything else in the movie to the side, it becomes uncomfortable.

Any kind of message – liberal or conservative – that guts a film so completely of its story is a problem. The message in Kingsman is conservative. The last movie that did this so egregiously was the liberal-minded remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. I don’t care what your politics are – if they’re such a priority that a popcorn movie feels more like chastisement than entertainment, the movie’s failed. A movie can have politics in it, yes, but it still has to prioritize being a movie and telling a story.

It’s a shame – Kingsman boasts a well crafted first half and offers some exceptionally choreographed, albeit horrendously violent, action. It just finds as many ways to shoot itself in the foot by the end as I’ve ever witnessed. It has too many politics and grudges to ring out, too many names to drop and meta commentaries to make. If you can’t tell Kingsman is a riff on the spy genre an hour in, don’t worry – characters will stop everything to remind you many, many times.

That’s not even bringing up the McDonald’s product placement, which tries to involve the ad as a meta joke the same way Wayne’s World and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby have in the past. As it does with many elements, Kingsman feels too unsure of itself to fully commit to the joke – instead of characters nodding and winking at the camera, you end up with Colin Firth and Samuel L. Jackson awkwardly grinding their way through a minute-long in-film ad.

That’s too often the feeling in Kingsman. It criticizes spy movies for being too political, then it obsesses over being political. It insists action movies are too serious and have forgotten how to be light-hearted, and minutes later it’s engaging in an extended sequence where civilians tear each other apart in bloody chunks. If anywhere, this is where the film should nod and wink, a la Shaun of the Dead, but this is where Kingsman doubles down and wants to show you how good it can really be at all the things it just insisted shouldn’t matter.

I love bloody action and rude humor in my films, and even I felt like I had to take a shower after Kingsman. It’s not any worse than a brutal horror movie or the average episode of South Park, but it spends two hours selling you on the idea that these things shouldn’t be part of action movies before turning around and relenting to each of them anyway. It leaves you feeling confused, disappointed, and a little betrayed. Maybe it’s just trying to troll its entire audience. If so, mission accomplished.

In many ways, Kingsman ends up being the polar opposite of last week’s action movie, Jupiter Ascending. Kingsman is a movie that’s not enough of anything to feel very satisfying. Jupiter Ascending is a movie that’s too much of everything. Given the choice, I’d rather be overwhelmed than underwhelmed. If you only have time for one action movie, stick with Jupiter Ascending.

Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?

This section helps us discuss one aspect of movies that we’d like to see improved – the representation of women. Read why we’re including this section here.

1. Does Kingsman: The Secret Service have more than one woman in it?

Yes. Samantha Womack plays Eggsy’s mother. Sofia Boutella plays a baddie named Gazelle. Sophie Cookson plays spy school companion Roxy. Fiona Hampton plays spy school companion Amelia. Hanna Alstrom plays an imprisoned princess.

2. Do they talk to each other?

No. For one very brief moment, both Roxy and Amelia talk to Eggsy, about Eggsy.

3. About something other than a man?

Well, they didn’t pass #2 so this is moot, but women do occasionally talk to men about the sinister plot at the film’s center, when they’re not talking about Eggsy or Valentine.

Look, this movie is, for lack of a better way of putting it, patriarchal as fuck. Eggsy’s mother exists so that he can save her. Gazelle (an amputee who fights with sword-like blade legs) exists so we can fetishize her. It’s also strongly hinted that she’s the sexual reward of the villain, being played by an actor more than twice her age.

Even when the film gives a woman a victory, as happens late in the spy school sequence, the victory is because she’s proven herself to be heartless and have no loyalty. In other words, the single victory given to a woman in the film is due to her not being as good as Eggsy. In storytelling terms, it’s really Eggsy’s victory we admire.

The single reward given to a woman in the movie is to cheer on the men at the end.

And the movie ends with a male hero being rewarded with anal sex from a princess he rescues.

This is all before considering that every hero is a white male and the two villains are an African-American man with a lisp (Samuel L. Jackson) and a differently abled Arab woman (Sofia Boutella).

It’s also worth noting, as Vanessa Tottle has pointed out, that all the soldiers who face our hero are male. This isn’t to save violence against women either – there are sequences where civilians brutally murder each other and women are murdered in the dozens here. If you’re going to do that, then include some female soldiers, too. Otherwise, you’re not being bold, you’re just being exploitative.

The film makes noises toward being anti-aristocratic, but it’s a bit of a false flag – in the end, the movie trumpets all the values of aristocracy and being member to the ruling class.

As damaging as anything else – and this is leaving the Bechdel realm for the moment – we live in a world where dangerous elements in the U.S. believe that President Barack Obama is a villain who is working to destroy our country at the behest of real-world villains. These real-world villains always belong to non-white ethnicities. The dangerous radicals in the U.S. who believe these things talk openly about assassination.

Very minor spoiler ahead: in Kingsman, the villain Valentine has the ear of Obama and convinces him to help destroy the human race. Two African-American men form a conspiracy to destroy the world. In the end, Obama is killed because of this conspiracy. His head is exploded, albeit in pretty colors, and I can’t help but think back to the last president who died that way. Kingsman wants to play this act off as some kind of joke, but coupled with everything else the movie says and does, it’s dangerous and mind-numbingly irresponsible filmmaking.

Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn have every right to place this kind of thing in their movie. Britain and the U.S. are free countries, after all. But, as the line goes, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism, and the movie they’ve constructed not only fails to work as a movie, it encourages some of the worst and most dangerous misogynistic and political perspectives I’ve ever seen put to film.

I try to find the good and the worthy in everything I see. Even if I don’t like a movie, I endeavor to communicate who will like the movie. Sometimes I come across something that – I understand exactly who will like the movie, and that worries me. It worries me that a movie can encourage perspectives of hatred and ownership by making those perspectives seem heroic. It takes characters who seem weak, attributes them with all the worst better-than-thou attitudes our society has to offer, and rewards them for embracing and exemplifying these attitudes. Kingsman is one of the ugliest, most uncomfortable movies I have seen in my life. It is bitterly disappointing.

Trailers of the Week — The Spoils of Tim Burton

by Gabe Valdez

Diving straight in:

BIG EYES

We’ve all been waiting for a return to form by Tim Burton for quite some time. His best film is an argument that will never be solved, but many cinephiles – myself included – will make the case for his kooky, emotive biography of the legendary B-movie director, Ed Wood.

Burton can go off the rails sometimes. It’s the emotion that can’t help but shine through in his most restrained moments that gives his best films their heart. So when Burton finally returns for another biography, let alone one centered on painter Margaret Keane and starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz, it’s cause to pay attention.

That and, if you know me at all, you know I’ll watch anything starring Krysten Ritter, one of our most unappreciated screen comedians.

LOW DOWN

Elle Fanning. Peter Dinklage. John Hawkes. Glenn Close. Lena Headey.

You simply don’t get better casts than this. What’s it like to grow up under a drug abusing, drunkard jazz legend? That’s the premise, and while that’s a stellar cast, this looks like Fanning’s movie. She’s been moving further and further out from older sister Dakota’s shadow and at this point may be the better actress – or at least the one choosing more interesting projects (I’m sure Dakota is crying into her Twilight money as I write this).

A MOST VIOLENT YEAR

Jessica Chastain is one of the most fearsomely commanding actors we have. She’s worked a career’s worth of roles in just a few short years. In 2011, she starred in seven films, including Take Shelter, Tree of Life, and The Help. In 2012, she starred in four films, including Zero Dark Thirty. 2013 saw two more films, and this year, she’s in another five or, depending on how you count The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby‘s different his and her variations of a troubled romance, six. Or seven. It’s complicated.

The point is, since her performances announced to the cinema world in 2011 that she’s the kind of force we may not have seen since Meryl Streep first brought her talents to bear, Chastain’s starred in at least 18 films, garnering two Oscar nominations. Anything she does is must-see because across those 18 films, she’s unfailingly created unique and compelling characters. Yeah, Oscar Isaac’s great, too, and J.C. Chandor is the very definition of an up-and-coming director (he helmed last year’s All Is Lost), but Chastain is the reason to see this.

MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

And, of course, the latest Men, Women & Children trailer. This is looking incredibly good. I featured an earlier trailer a few weeks ago and, aside from championing Jennifer Garner and Judy Greer as under-utilized actors, I stand by the idea that this could echo Adam Sandler’s touching and scary dramatic break in Punch Drunk Love several years back.

THE LIBERATOR

And it doesn’t fit the theme, but all the trailers rarely do, so feast your eyes on this beautiful preview for The Liberator. We aren’t offered many Latin American heroes, let alone in a film that looks so sumptuous and epic.

Worst Trailer of the Week (Tie) –
THE HOUSES THAT OCTOBER BUILT

Oh dear. Normally, I don’t include films made on the cheap. That’s why Bigfoot’s film debut in Exists was excused from Worst Trailer a few weeks ago. But this is from some pretty major found footage talent and it manages to look profoundly atrocious inside of two minutes.

Worst Trailer of the Week (Tie) –
KITE

I also don’t normally feature straight-to-DVD in this section, but Kite was a groundbreaking anime. Why? Not so much for its cliché storyline, but rather for how stylishly it delivered such an incredible amount of violence in so short a time. Centering on an assassin who gets close to her targets using methods of distraction that sometimes involve her underage sexuality, it either bordered on the tasteless or took Japan’s silent cultural endorsement of child sexuality to task. Depends on who you ask. Certainly the imagery in the movie was deeply controversial.

This live-action, English language adaptation? Well, it stars Samuel L. Jackson, who does a film like this every year just to keep his B-movie cred shiny. It otherwise presents itself as a wannabe Hitgirl movie. Will it contain the confrontational gore of the original, or present action free of consequence and saturated in American-style one liners? Will it use the disturbing sexuality of the anime to hammer home a real social commentary, or will it use the premise as an excuse for cheap titillation and provocation? I have my worries.

I haven’t seen the original in so long, I don’t think I could give an accurate opinion. I remember liking the cinematic techniques in the action scenes, but that’s about it. You don’t adapt this project as a cheap cash-in free from addressing in some way what made it so controversial in the first place, and that’s what this trailer reeks of.

Cyberpunk Masterpiece — “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”

I always liked Captain America the best. It wasn’t his patriotism or the super-soldier serum, or even the impenetrable shield that did it. It was the fact that he’s the only superhero in Marvel’s canon who started out willing to sacrifice himself to do the right thing. He didn’t bother with the frat boy antics of Iron Man and Thor, or the rage issues of The Hulk. Captain America’s superheroics aren’t sources of egomania or painstaking angst; they’re a moral opportunity. He never needed to grow up into his role like those others; he was waiting for his role to grow up into him.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is Marvel’s best movie to-date by a huge margin. In fact, I think it’s going to be in the discussion as one of the best films of 2014. Instead of being a superhero movie, it’s a tense, man on the run, 70’s-style spy thriller. It just happens to have superheroes on the run, which means all those midnight meetings in abandoned parking garages are turned into car chases and aerial dogfights that wreck entire city blocks.

Finding himself at odds with SHIELD, the international agency in charge of all things superheroic and alien, Captain America (Chris Evans) is joined by The Avengers teammate Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and newcomer Falcon (Anthony Mackie). Each of the heroes gets his or her own action scene – even SHIELD director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). These sequences are intense while being more down to earth than the Captain’s previous outings.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier opens with the Captain making a friend, Sam. It’s not something Captain America does easily, but Sam runs a VA group for soldiers having trouble re-adjusting to normal life. I’m sure you’ve heard the statistic that the United States spends more on our military than the next 10 countries combined spend on theirs. Yet, after they come home, it can take years for veterans to receive crucial benefits that sometimes mean the difference between sanity and agony, survival and death. Captain America promises he’ll visit Sam at the VA, and he does. In fact, he makes a couple of hospital visits that will surprise you. Later, he’s introduced to three multi-billion dollar, sub-orbital supercarriers capable of annihilating millions of lives at the touch of a button.

This is where 70’s spy thriller meets cyberpunk, science-fiction’s least-happy subgenre. The big question The Winter Soldier asks is that, in an age of targeted drone strikes, warrantless NSA phone-tapping, and supersize militaries with less human supervision, what’s the next step in that progression? There’s a messy intersection where governments and corporations meet, and where the Pentagon meets private military contractors.

Sooner or later, The Winter Soldier suggests, someone’s going to take advantage of that in an ideological fashion. Let’s not be reactionary and say that we’re at that point yet, or that George W. or Obama are those people. Neither one is the stuff of worldwide nightmares, no matter how many Hitler mustaches we can Photoshop into witty Facebook posts.

The Winter Soldier has a big, important message that’s worth paying attention to, and it gets there through pulse-pounding action scenes, Marvel’s trademark dose of dry comic wit, and surprisingly good acting. Robert Redford, as villain Alexander Pierce, and Johansson, who’s been getting better opportunities in films like these, stand out.

Some superheroes are escapist fantasies for those who want to be rich and famous, or exercise their anger and vengeance on those they feel deserve it. So are some political positions. I’ll admit it, sometimes those are the heroes I idolize most. Captain America, though? He’s the escapist fantasy for those who want to make the world a better place, who don’t look at that struggle as a battle, but as a decision you make every day when you wake up.

He fights like any superhero does, because an audience demands it. The Winter Soldier suggests the best way of avoiding its cyberpunk allegory of the future isn’t to pick up a gun, however. It’s to offer a helping hand to those who need it. It’s to keep manpower in our military and stomp the brakes on automation. It’s to make secrets public so that we all have a say and not to put power in the hands of the few, or the one. It’s to look at being human, and all of us together a country, as a moral opportunity. So I always liked Captain America the best. I still do.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is rated PG-13 for violence, gunplay, and action.