Logan Marshall Green and Tammy Blanchard, Photo Courtesy of Drafthouse Films The InvitationDirected by Karyn KusamaOut April 8Rating  The Invitation opens with Will (Logan Marshall-Green) dragging his eternally patient girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) to a dinner party being thrown by his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her husband David (Michiel Huisman) to celebrate their return from a stint in Mexico.

A new Star Wars movie trailer has dropped, and there’s a lot to talk about here: Before you watch it, you should know that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story takes place before A New Hope, making it chronologically the first Star Wars story in the canon, if you (like me) prefer to go through your life as though the prequels never happened. Shh, shh, it never happened. Back to Rogue One.The first character we meet is Jyn Erso, played by Felicity Jones.  She’s getting dressed down by Mon Mothma (played by Genevieve O'Reilly) for being “reckless, aggressive, and undisciplined.

It’s already difficult for female directors to get their films made, but even more difficult if they feature a female protagonist. Gina Prince-Bythewood faced similar obstacles making her most recent film, Beyond the Lights, but faced even greater adversity because she wanted to cast two black leads.In an interview with Roger Ebert.com, she said of bringing her vision for Beyond the Lights to the screen, “It’s disheartening, trust me, to sit in a room as a black female to hear that your story is not worthy of production. And I would hear that over and over and over.

Weber on the set of Angel of Broadway A silent-movie mogul in the early 1900s whose controversial films tackled taboo topics like abortion and race relations, Lois Weber is probably the most important director you've never heard of. At one time, she was the highest- paid director in Hollywood, male or female. Magazines called her “The Muse of the Reel” and a “Photo-Genius.” She made an estimated 300 films, was elected the first mayor of Universal City, and silent- movie superstar Mary Pickford called her “one of the most interesting women in the history of motion pictures.

Anyone who’s ever tried to get a band together knows what a hassle it can be to get musicians to commit to a schedule. Now imagine if you also have the added obstacles of seven decades of violent ideological conflict between your singer and members’ homelands, military checkpoints on the way to practice, religious taboos around music and gender, and—oops—the fact that some of your members never really learned an instrument.

Niki Caro would not consider herself a “crusading feminist filmmaker” but her films often feature female protagonists.Caro is a New Zealand-born writer and director. She was born in Wellington, New Zealand and earned a BFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. Originally, she was interested in art, specifically, metal sculptures, but her interest switched to film. She received a postgraduate degree in film from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.

Melissa Rauch, Photo Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics The BronzeDirected by Bryan BuckleyOut March 18Rating  In the oddball anti-sports comedy The Bronze, Melissa Rauch stars as a washed-up former Olympic gymnast who is doing her best to keep reliving the glory days of her miraculous bronze medal victory many years earlier. Still living in her Ohio hometown and scoring free junk food at the mall, she seems content to live the rest of her days in her old Team USA uniform.

An Amy Schumer/Goldie Hawn collaboration is making all of our dreams come true. Goldie Hawn is finally returning to the big screen for the first time since 2002, playing Amy Schumer’s on-screen mother in a yet-to-be-named film directed by Jonathan Levine. Hawn last starred in the 2002 film The Banger Sisters before dedicating the next 13 years to her organization The Hawn Foundation.

  In the wake of her interview with BUST, where she discusses feminism, directing and her goal to bring awareness and diversity to the film industry, Amandla Stenberg has been cast in a Black Lives Matter-inspired YA film called The Hate U Give. According to Entertainment Weekly,"The Hate U Give, Angela Thomas’ forthcoming YA novel [is] about a 16-year-old girl who grew up in poverty but now attends a suburban prep school and finds herself torn between two worlds when she witnesses a police officer shoot her unarmed friend.

Amy Heckerling grew up in the Bronx and then Queens and attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. She wanted to be a writer and artist for MAD Magazine but changed her career goal when she saw what the boy next to her had written for his goal. He wanted to be a film director.“I was really annoyed because I thought that if an idiot like that guy could say he wanted to be a director, then so could I, and certainly I should be a director more than he should. It had never occurred to me that that was a job possibility.