Motherhood

The Daft Hunks are two twentysomething YouTube influencers who don’t review music so much as react to it (their most-watched videos see them listening to Olivia Rodrigo and Lana Del Rey in real time). On their latest video they check out the new single from Kim Gordon. “She’s 70 years old and still doing it,” says one of the Hunks. “That’s crazy,” says the other.They begin playing Gordon’s new single, Bye Bye, its dread-inducing hip-hop beats scraping against each other as Gordon intones a scribbled to-do list. “Buy a…

W ho better to play a New York high society socialite than Chloë Sevigny, the former club kid turned fashionista who was profiled by Jay McInerney for The New Yorker at 19? In 1995, one year after that infamous piece hit newsstands, Sevigny would star as a Manhattan teen who discovers she’s HIV positive in Kids, written by her pal Harmony Korine. The film was almost immediately cemented as a cult classic, sending her down an arthouse-cinema path that’s included Gummo, Boys Don’t Cry (earning her an Oscar…

A modern folk horror tale that draws upon Australia’s troubled history to enhance its monstrous elements, The Moogai also includes an exploration of postpartum depression. Unfortunately, its one-dimensional plot ultimately detracts from the elements that make it an otherwise unique story.Alex Winter on the Most Important Modern Horror Movie It’s rare to see a horror film that centers contemporary Aboriginal characters. The Moogai, which writer-director Jon Bell expanded from his award-winning short, follows Sarah (Shari…

They say nothing prepares you. Before having my baby, I approached the literature of motherhood as though I were about to sit an exam. If my studies tempered the shock of birth and early parenthood, then I didn’t notice. The sheer physical and emotive force of the experience left me profoundly shaken. Words felt insufficient. And yet I kept reading – everything I could get my hands on. I wanted answers. I wanted to feel recognised. I wanted this untranslatable experience to be translated into language. Most of all, I …

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Mothers—and non-mothers. Our language creates the falsehood that being with a child is a norm. Words like "childless" or "childfree" firmly place the person without a child as the one lacking. Women who decide not to have children are marked as outsiders by our social and cultural norms. And the expectation is not…

For Quinta Brunson, the end of the months-long SAG-AFTRA strike doesn’t mean a return to the familiar. Instead, it’s a chance for the Emmy Award-winning writer, producer, and actress to join her same set with a brand-new view on life, hard work, and stability.  The creator of ABC’s hit sitcom Abbott Elementary, Brunson has experienced a meteoric rise in Hollywood that many Tinseltown hopefuls could only dream of. After a number of viral video series including The Girl Who Has Never Been on a Nice Date landed her a…

A San Francisco Bay Area single mother with two children who have already been sucked into the foster-care system, Gia (a revelatory performance from Oakland rapper Tia Nomore) is pregnant with her third child. Heavily so. Her belly seems cumbersome and incongruous on her slight frame. Brief fantasy interludes that cut into the naturalistic, almost documentary-style observational approach of this impressive feature debut suggest that Gia is deeply conflicted by her pregnancy and by the umbilical emotional connection that…

Here is a deeply felt social-realist movie performed with integrity and calm by west coast rapper and musician Tia Nomore making her acting debut and writer-director Savanah Leaf – herself making her feature directing debut, having developed this project from a short film made with Taylor Russell. Leaf is a former music video director and, London-born, competed in the 2012 London Olympics as a volleyball player and so, remarkably, becomes the first Team GB graduate to make a film for the ultra-hip studio A24.Nomore plays…

Women seeking to…

Image: Courtesy of Shudder/An IFC Films ReleaseAfter making its debut at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year—read io9's review here—director and co-writer Laura Moss’ Birth/Rebirth arrives in theaters next month. It’s a sci-fi horror tale about two very different women who realize they have a particularly grim fascination in common.Alan Cumming on playing King James in Doctor WhoA new trailer is here to warn you about tampering with the laws of nature, no matter how much you want to try to bend them to your will.…