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Too often on screen, plus size women are side characters in a thin protagonist’s story. They end up disregarded, two dimensional, and are often doused in diet culture messaging. Thankfully – though at a glacial pace – that is starting to change. With the filmmakers and showrunners behind the camera becoming slowly but increasingly more diverse, so too are the stories they tell. As a result, the industry is finally starting to provide us with authentic, beautiful, complex, fat female characters to treasure. ...

Right at the beginning of Plus One, Jack Quaid’s Ben hits the nail on the head when it comes to the often nightmarish process of growing older and hitting life’s milestones – “I feel like once everybody saw thirty on the horizon, they were like, ‘hey guys, you know what? I would like to get engaged’”. Click to read the review in full. 55 4430 Views Data scraped from web archives. Preserved for the cinematography community.

Just like the tune that Black Canary (aka. Dinah Lance, played by Jurnee Smollett-Bell) sings in the opening act of Birds of Prey, the Gotham we’ve known in the DCEU up until now has been a man’s world. Thankfully, Margot Robbie decided to change that. Birds of Prey: *And The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn *– to give it its full title – picks up sometime after the events of David Ayers’ much maligned Suicide Squad, and it’s here we meet Harley recovering from her break-up with ‘Mr J’. ...

Horse Girl opens with a conversation between Sarah (Alison Brie) and her crafts store colleague Joan (Molly Shannon) about ‘DNA N U’, a service that tells you where in the world you come from. Sarah is intrigued; she doesn’t know much about her family. The camera moves to an overhead shot of a sea of plain, pale blue fabric being sliced, straight down the middle, by Sarah’s scissors. This simple act is a statement of intent from the film – a visual metaphor for how Sarah’s seemingly meek life, mousey exterior, and sense of reality is to be split apart. ...

It’s almost a century since the Oscars began. Despite its best efforts to diversify, including inviting swathes of new members to join the Academy, the biggest awards ceremony in the cinematic calendar still can’t seem to get it right. One of the most notable changes for the 2020 awards is the renaming of the category previously known as ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ to ‘Best International Feature Film’. So – why the change? ...

Say My Name begins as you might expect. Two strangers are getting hot and heavy in a hotel room, when the woman asks the man to do as the title suggests. Unfortunately, he hasn’t a clue what her name is, despite his best efforts to remember it with a mnemonic. The thing is, as the film goes on and we get to know this illustrious female character a little better, it seems even she can’t quite decide what to call herself either. ...

A film that feels sadly left out of the awards conversation is Jordan Peele’s second feature **Us, a landmark in the film calendar back in March. It had all the visionary stamps of excellence we’d come to expect from the director after his debut, Get Out, became a cultural phenomenon – and, most importantly, it matches (and in some cases exceeds) the achievements of Joker when it comes to the very things that the Clown Prince’s origin story was nominated for. ...

Welcome to Fatness In Film, a new monthly column analysing examples of fat representation and body diversity on screen. Positive depictions of fat bodies are hard to find, but Shrill is a recent example of plus size storytelling done right. Adapted from activist and writer Lindy West’s memoir Shrill: Notes From A Loud Woman, the half hour comedy series stars Aidy Bryant as Annie. She’s a budding journalist stuck in a bad relationship, a workplace that doesn’t take her seriously, and putting up with a daily tide of negativity and microaggressions because of her body. ...

Several times during Bombshell, Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) is accused of being a feminist. She rebukes the suggestion every time; “I’m not a feminist, I’m a lawyer”. #MeToo and Time’s Up were some of the defining stories of the last decade. Bombshell looks at the takedown that preceded those movements – Fox News journalist Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) filing a lawsuit against network boss Roger Ailes (John Lithgow) to expose the sexual harassment and discrimination that she had experienced from him during her time at the channel. ...

For Karen Gillan’s directorial debut The Party’s Just Beginning, she leaves behind the fantastical worlds of Doctor Who and Guardians of the Galaxy, and heads back to her Scottish roots. She stars as Liusaidh, a twenty-something that works on the cheese counter at a supermarket by day, and goes out to drink and shag her feelings away by night. Her best friend recently killed themselves – not a spoiler, it’s revealed before the title card rolls – and Liusaidh has been spiralling ever since. ...