Over the past four years, we’ve seen Kathryn Bigelow win an Oscar, Kristen Wiig make the funniest movie to ever involve defecating in the street, and Lena Dunham become the voice of a generation—or at least A voice, of A generation. Women in the entertainment industry have been getting a lot of well-deserved attention, and they’re making us proud across genres. From a girl-centric dark comedy to a Holocaust love story, here are three upcoming female-driven movies not to be missed:
The trailer for Leslye Headland’s Bachelorette (in theaters September 7th) was released about a month ago, its apparent similarities to Bridesmaids inspiring most of us to assume the worst: someone has begun the dreaded train of tragic Bridesmaids knockoffs, and they’re taking Kirsten Dunst down with them. Luckily, we’ve never been more wrong. Bachelorette starts out by introducing us to three twenty-somethings who hate themselves and their full-figured, engaged best friend (played by up-and-comer Rebel Wilson), and it only gets more honest from there. Headland’s script is black comedy the likes of which we haven’t seen since Heathers, and Dunst’s performance as the Regina George contingent of the post-college Plastics, alone, makes this movie the best upgrade the Mean Girls generation could have hoped for. It’s what Say Yes To The Dress would be like if everyone had snorted a bunch of cocaine before going to Kleinfeld’s.
On October 12th, writer/director Ry Russo Young’s fourth independent film, Nobody Walks, hits theaters. The movie’s script is co-written by Young and Lena Dunham, and the trailer promises a version of Dunham’s relationship-focused, realism-aspiring work that’s a little bit more visual and a lot more grown up. Olivia Thirlby plays a New York filmmaker who moves in with a sound designer (John Krasinski) and his family in their California home. Affairs ensue, foundations are tested, and based on a snippet of the trailer in which he throws a chair into a pool, I’m expecting the most dramatic performance Krasinski has ever given.
In theaters this September, Cate Shortland’s Lore tells the story of a teenage girl in post-WWII Germany who’s forced to bring her siblings to safety after her Nazi parents are arrested. For her long-anticipated follow-up to 2004’s Somersault, Shortland has found a story with the perfect combination of emotionally evocative elements: sexual awakening, beautiful cinematography, babies, and Nazis.
Photos: Bachelorette: Jacobs Hutchings; Nobody Walks: Nicholas Trikonis; Lore: © Music Box Films 2012
