Read the reviews from the best documentaries like Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print and Zurawski v Texas from the past year.
Film and TV Reviews
The Best Feminist Fiction Films and TV Shows of 2025
From devastating dramas to sharp satires and genre-bending thrillers, this year’s feminist fiction on screen refused easy answers—and demanded our attention. These films and series center women’s agency, ambition and survival, offering stories that linger long after the credits roll. Here are some of the standout feminist fiction watches of the year.
Aviva Dove-Viebahn reviews the top fiction feminist watches from the past year including The Substance, Ironheart and The Better Sister.
2025’s Top Feminist Moments in Pop Culture
Another year of feminist struggles, another year of feminist triumphs. Our pop culture pushed back and provided many glimpses into feminist resistance throughout the culture.
This year’s top feminist moments reveal how artists, storytellers and creators confronted regressive politics with imagination, joy, righteous anger and expansive visions of humanity.
A Landmark Self-Defense Case in the Age of Mass Incarceration: A New Documentary Tells Joan Little’s Story
A new documentary short chronicles Little’s groundbreaking case—and her historic victory as the first U.S. woman acquitted for using deadly force to resist sexual assault.
Fear, Privilege and the Illusion of Safety in ‘Only Murders in the Building’
As Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building unfolds, safety begins to look less like locked doors and more like open conversation.
The friendship among Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) is where this transformation starts. Mabel—young, Latina and less financially secure—doesn’t fit the Arconia’s image of who belongs. But through her, Charles and Oliver begin to question the false comfort of wealth and privacy. Together, they build a kind of safety grounded in trust and shared vulnerability.
By its later seasons, Only Murders has redefined what security means. It’s no longer about who can afford to keep others out—it’s about who’s willing to let others in. The show suggests that real safety comes not from walls, locks or property values, but from empathy, care and connection.
Embattled, Yet Empowering: ‘One Battle After Another’ Smashes Centuries-Old Paradigm of Black Victimhood
Paul Thomas Anderson is not the first to subvert one Black femme stereotype after another. He’s just the whitest. However, the director’s latest film, One Battle After Another, serves to hold up a mirror to 2025 America.
Some critics have accused Anderson of writing Black women who are too sexualized, stereotypical or sidelined. However, recent interviews reveal that actors were often encouraged to go off script in order to add more authenticity to their roles. So it’s likely that many of the shades of gray used to paint these Black women as imperfect yet inspiring insurgents are derived from the Black women with whom PTA collaborates and cohabitates.
For me, the results defied history with humor and humanity.
‘The Librarians’ Hits Theaters: Watch the Acclaimed Doc on Book Bans and Free Speech
Kim Snyder’s The Librarians follows women in a long-undervalued and underpaid profession—who are now coming under attack. The film premiered to acclaim at Sundance and later SXSW, and will be released in select theaters this fall.
Soderbergh’s ‘Presence’ Isn’t a Horror Movie—It’s a Ghost Story About Grief, Love, Redemption and Family
That trailer set me up for a straight-up horror film. What I got instead was something far more unsettling—and, ultimately, more rewarding. Presence isn’t built on cheap scares or cathartic screams. It’s a slow, intimate drift through grief and perspective, a ghost story told entirely from the other side.
By committing fully to realism, Soderbergh dismantles horror’s most familiar conventions and archetypes, leaving us with something haunting in an entirely different way. We aren’t watching the ghost terrorize a family—we are the ghost. We float through their arguments, their secrets, their loneliness, until the banality of eternity itself begins to sink in.
The result is one of the most quietly devastating haunted-house films in recent memory: a meditation on loss, dread and the slow realization that the scariest thing of all isn’t a jump scare, but grief itself.
FX’s ‘The Bear’ Season 4 Embraces Feminist Leadership, Challenging Aggressive Masculinity and Reimagining the Workplace
The renowned show’s newest season is carving a new, feminist path for recognition of women-led workplaces, in spite of a history of white, male dominance.
Cultural depictions of feminist leadership, even when fictional, can help us both imagine and demand better. We need not settle for egotistical, unpredictable, manipulative leaders who focus on personal gains and grievances.
From Private Island to Personal Hell: ‘Blink Twice’ Shows the Power of Survivors Working Together
Blink Twice, now streaming, reminds it audience that not all women are allies and not all men are predators. But some get away with acts of sexual violence akin to murder.
And when survivors band together, we’re going to do more than just dance on your table. In the blink of an eye—we’ll turn your private island into your personal hell.