The sufferings of a homosexual prince from Gujarat is clearly not everyone’s cup of tea and sympathy. When Manvendra Singh Gohil, the prince of Rajpipla decided to come out as gay, he did so in a Gujarati language daily, the Divya Bhaskar. The story caused a sensation and moved Oprah Winfrey enough to fly him to the US to appear on her show. Now a Gujarati film based on his life story has been denied a tax exemption service in his home state because the movie depicts “social evil.” 

These topless women are FEMEN, an activist group that uses “sextremism” tactics to shed light on injustices. Founded in 2008 by Anna Hutsol, FEMEN originally started in Kiev before branching out to France for both expansion reasons and political asylum for its members. As of today, there are FEMEN branches in Germany, Canada, Turkey and Israel. The documentary follows the activist group from December 2011 to August 2012, as they plan and stage protests in Kiev, Zurich, Belarus, Paris and Moscow. 

It is unequivocally a good thing that feminism is at the forefront of the public mind, and that media is being held accountable for failing female narratives. There has been a definite clamor for more female-led projects, particularly in regard to popular mainstream films, most especially action movies, considering they are currently dominating the market. With such a suffusion of films dealing in similar subject matters, it's hard not to notice that they've been telling the same stories for years, and those stories all revolve around white men.

But the show departs from expected sitcom tropes in one crucial aspect, groundbreaking because it hasn’t happened for two decades: Fresh Off the Boat is a sitcom about Asian-Americans. In early February, entertainment critics and the Asian-American community alike eagerly anticipated the pilot episode, holding their collective breathe to see how this show would depict a minority that remains largely unrepresented by the media. 

Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire in the 60s documents the rise and fall of both Esquire and Hayes’ presence in the social and cultural mainstream. Written, directed and narrated by Tom Hayes, Harold Hayes’ son, the documentary features interviews with past and present Esquire writers, editors, photographers and staff, as well as film clips and sound recordings of Harold Hayes at work and at home. The documentary dives into both Harold Hayes’ past and Esquire’s history; this context is important because it demonstrates just how fateful it was for their two paths to coincide. 

Director Eric Van Looy’s remake of the Danish film “Loft” is an off-kilter morality play marked by unseemly characters, unlikely actions and a multitude of twists. The plot centers on five men – Vincent (Karl Urban), Chris (James Marsden), Luke (Wentworth Miller), Marty (Eric Stonestreet) and Philip (Matthias Schoenaerts) – who agree to rent a secret loft where they can take women without their wives’ knowledge.

Director Clint Eastwood’s meditation on the life of Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle was the hit of the movie award’s season. It won only a single Oscar (for sound editing), but it was up for six awards including best picture, and it grossed more than all the other best picture nominees combined. In other words, the film was a critical darling as well as a box-office smash, a combination that is difficult to achieve.    

Montgomery Clift has faded from our cultural landscape so completely that even the most enduring images from some of his most important films aren't of him. Take From Here to Eternity, for example: a film remembered more for dramatic kissing in the surf than the conflicted young man who starred in it.So first the question is: who is Montgomery Clift? Clift was a movie star of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s who blazed brightly in the early part of his career before an inevitable deterioration, considered by those in the know to be one of the greatest actors of all time. 

In Ex Machina, a new film by Alex Garland, a 26-year-old programming whizkid named Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a company lottery. The prize? Spend a week at the remote and sleekly futuristic home of the company’s billionaire founder Nathan (Oscar Isaac), and conduct a test to determine if Nathan’s latest invention actually possesses the long-sought-after holy grail of science – artificial intelligence (AI). 

Alice Howland (Moore) is a  brilliant linguistics professor who has a warm and loving home life and a rewarding career where she is respected by students and colleagues. Then she begins forgetting things. At first, the problems are relatively minor. She loses track of where she’s going in a lecture. It’s an embarrassing moment, but little more. Then after getting lost while going for a jog around her college campus, she decides to seek medical help.