Nobody has a perfect mother. And, despite what some pushy moms would have us believe, nobody has a perfect daughter, either. It's sometimes hard to communicate with each other, but what can you do? Should you turn to Dr. Phil, psychotropic drugs, a hit man? No! Here's the solution: It's so simple, so obvious, so painless---the movies! Drawing on more than twenty years of watching movies together, real-life mother and daughter Rosemary Rogers and Nell Rogers Michlin offer plot synopses, cast reviews, and behind-the-scenes gossip for more than one hundred of their all-time-favorite movies, including invaluable ratings you won't find anywhere else, such as: *Bonding Potential: Looking for serious mother-daughter time? Try one of their top picks, like Terms of Endearment, Freaky Friday, or The Joy Luck Club. *Hunk Factor: Hannah and Her Sisters may only rate a 1 (Michael Caine and Woody Allen have other important qualities....), but School Ties, with a shirtless Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Brendan Fraser, gets a well-earned 10. *Hankie Factor: Because sometimes we all need a good cry. *Squirming in Your Seat Watching a Sex Scene with Your Mother/Daughter: Trust us, you'll want to know ahead of time. Wise and witty, Mother-Daughter Movies offers a fresh perspective on life's most important issues---from family conflict to surviving high school to understanding when tweezed eyebrows can totally change your life.

Few things are more meaningful—or more complicated—than mother-daughter relationships. This helpful parenting guide helps moms navigate their relationships with their daughters to create strong ties and a close, respectful connection that will last a lifetime. SuEllen Hamkins, MD, and Renée Schultz, MA, originally created the Mother-Daughter Project with other women in their community in the hopes of strengthening their bonds with their then seven-year-old girls. The group met regularly to speak frankly about such issues as friendships and aggression, puberty, body image, drugs, and sexuality. The results were amazing: confident, assertive teenage girls with strong self-images and close ties to their moms. Equally important, the mothers navigated their own concerns about adolescence with integrity and grace. From their dedication and efforts arose The Mother-Daughter Project, an incredibly useful parenting handbook that details the success of the Project’s groundbreaking model, providing mothers with a road map for staying close with their own daughters through adolescence and beyond.

Women's filmmaking in France has been a source of both delight and despair. On the one hand, the numbers are impressive – over 250 feature-length films were made by over 100 women directors in France in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, despite the heritage of French feminism, French women directors characteristically disclaim their gender as a significant factor in their filmmaking. This incisive study provides an informative, critical guide to this major body of work, exploring the boundaries between personal films (intimate psychological dramas relating to key stages in life) and genre films (which demonstrate women's ability to appropriate and rework popular genres). It analyzes the effects of postfeminism, women's desire to enter the mainstream, and the impact of a new generation of filmmakers, enabling readers to take stock of the wealth and diversity of women's contribution to French cinema during the 1980s and 1990s.

The book investigates contemporary women directors who put 'a poetics of horror' to new use in their work, expanding the range of gendered and racialized perspectives in the horror genre.

In An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy offers an engaging overview of an important trend--the filmmaking of postcolonial, Third World, and other displaced individuals living in the West. How their personal experiences of exile or diaspora translate into cinema is a key focus of Naficy's work. Although the experience of expatriation varies greatly from one person to the next, the films themselves exhibit stylistic similarities, from their open- and closed-form aesthetics to their nostalgic and memory-driven multilingual narratives, and from their emphasis on political agency to their concern with identity and transgression of identity. The author explores such features while considering the specific histories of individuals and groups that engender divergent experiences, institutions, and modes of cultural production and consumption. Treating creativity as a social practice, he demonstrates that the films are in dialogue not only with the home and host societies but also with audiences, many of whom are also situated astride cultures and whose desires and fears the filmmakers wish to express. Comparing these films to Hollywood films, Naficy calls them "accented." Their accent results from the displacement of the filmmakers, their alternative production modes, and their style. Accented cinema is an emerging genre, one that requires new sets of viewing skills on the part of audiences. Its significance continues to grow in terms of output, stylistic variety, cultural diversity, and social impact. This book offers the first comprehensive and global coverage of this genre while presenting a framework in which to understand its intricacies.

Women in African Cinema: Beyond the Body Politic showcases the very prolific but often marginalised presence of women in African cinema, both on the screen and behind the camera. This book provides the first in-depth and sustained examination of women in African cinema. Films by women from different geographical regions are discussed in case studies that are framed by feminist theoretical and historical themes, and seen through an anti-colonial, philosophical, political and socio-cultural cinematic lens. A historical and theoretical introduction provides the context for thematic chapters exploring topics ranging from female identities, female friendships, women in revolutionary cinema, motherhood and daughterhood, women’s bodies, sexuality, and spirituality. Each chapter serves up a theoretical-historical discussion of the chosen theme, followed by two in-depth case studies that provide contextual and transnational readings of the films as well as outlining production, distribution and exhibition contexts. This book contributes to the feminist anti-racist revision of the canon by placing African women filmmakers squarely at the centre of African film culture. Demonstrating the depth and diversity of the feminine or female aesthetic in African cinema, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of African cinema, media studies and African studies.

Examining the ideas, philosophies and strategies that inform and enable a young woman’s self-determination for a new century, this is a detailed, insightful study of Greta Gerwig’s much-loved, influential and critically acclaimed film. Drawing on Transcendentalism, French feminist thought, Californian art and the work of iconic American essayist Joan Didion, Rob Stone approaches Lady Bird as a film about young women’s self-determination in relation to other women and waves of feminist history. Structured to emulate the evolving conscience and emerging consciousness of the film’s eponymous protagonist, this new volume in the Cinema and Youth Cultures series provides an incisive portrait of a particular American youth subculture struggling to assert its identity between the shock of 9/11 in 2001 and the global financial crisis of 2008. It also sensitively examines tensions between Gerwig and Lady Bird, and between Lady Bird being set in 2002 and made in 2017. Written by an expert on American independent cinema and the dynamics of World Cinema, this volume explores strategies of self-determination that ignite in the friction between mothers and daughters and culminate in considerations of how the film’s form and aesthetics lead to reflections on its philosophy and politics. Situating Lady Bird in the genre of youth movies and feminist film practice and culture, this book is ideal for students and researchers looking at wider dialogues and discourses about feminism, philosophy, gender, genre and American independent filmmaking.

Using a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, the contributing scholars to this collection analyze culturally specific and globally held attitudes about mothers and mothering, as represented in world cinema. Examining films from a range of countries including Afghanistan, India, Iran, Eastern Europe, Canada, and the United States, the various chapters contextualize the socio-cultural realities of motherhood as they are represented on screen, and explore the maternal figure as she has been glamorized and celebrated, while simultaneously subjected to public scrutiny. Collectively, this scholarly investigation provides insights into where women’s struggles converge, while also highlighting the dramatically different realities of women around the globe.

German society's inability and/or refusal to come to terms with its Nazi past has been analyzed in many cultural works, including the well-known books Society without the Father and The Inability to Mourn. In this pathfinding study, Susan Linville challenges the accepted wisdom of these books by focusing on a cultural realm in which mourning for the Nazi past and opposing the patriarchal and authoritarian nature of postwar German culture are central concerns—namely, women's feminist auto/biographical films of the 1970s and 1980s. After a broad survey of feminist theory, Linville analyzes five important films that reflect back on the Third Reich through the experiences of women of different ages—Marianne Rosenbaum's Peppermint Peace, Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother, Jutta Brückner's Hunger Years, Margarethe von Trotta's Marianne and Juliane, and Jeanine Meerapfel's Malou. By juxtaposing these films with the accepted theories on German culture, Linville offers a fresh appraisal not only of the films' importance but especially of their challenge to misogynist interpretations of the German failure to grieve for the horrors of its Nazi past.