Ava DuVernay

The photo that launched a meme that inspired a social media dream is now becoming a reality because sometimes the internet has some okay ideas (sometimes). Rihanna and Lupita Nyong’o are teaming up to co-star in a buddy movie directed by Ava DuVernay from a screenplay by Issa Rae — if that sounds too good to be true, that’s because it was…until it wasn’t.

Director Ava DuVernay is a stylish woman in a pretty general sense, but it was doubly impressive that she came so extremely correct to the Oscars last month. As Nick Kroll and John Mulaney noted in their monologue at the Independent Spirit Awards slightly beforehand, DuVernay had just gotten off of a globe-crossing flight so that she could return to Hollywood from New Zealand, where she‘s been hard at work shooting her adaptation of fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time. (And making history while she’s at it, as the first black female director to command a budget of $100 million.) It would appear that shooting on this grand undertaking has recently come to an end, with DuVernay now allowing the public a little glimpse at their production via Twitter.

Let’s be honest, 2016 was a garbage year, but 2017 and the years ahead don’t look all that bright either. The current state of American politics is part chaos, part circus, part something right out of a dystopian novel. Regardless of who you voted for last November, the truth is we’re about to enter a new era of American politics, one that’s already concerning for many, and especially terrifying for American minorities. But as film lovers and critics, we often look to the screen to help us through the struggles we’re faced with outside the movie theater. Beyond entertainment, art has the power to lend us strength, hope, and inspiration. It can educate us, give us a vessel for catharsis, and enable us to build empathy for those we identify with on screen, as well as those we may not. In many ways, art’s impact is vital now more than ever.

Disney is not going to let us forget about Ava DuVernay’s upcoming A Wrinkle in Time adaptation anytime soon. As soon as casting was completed, DuVernay and her crew got straight to work on production, announcing today in a creative way that filming has officially begun, and exactly when we can expect to see the movie in theaters.

Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time might have just cast its first villain, in the form of none other than Ant-Man co-star Michael Pena. At this point, we should have learned by now not to be surprised by any more casting choices, as DuVernay first made the central family of the film mixed race instead of white, and cast Zach Galifianakis as a character who’s normally a woman. And now we have Michael Pena, who could appear in the film as one of the most sinister, creepy characters of the book.

With Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, we’ve learned to expect the unexpected. First, she made the decision to update the story, having a black protagonist and a mixed-race family at the center of the story. Now, she’s trying her hand at gender-swapping, casting Zach Galifianakis in the role of the usually female Happy Medium.

In a pretty inspired move, back when the idea for a Wrinkle in Time movie was still a whisper on the wind, director Ava DuVernay decided to give her adaptation the kind of multicultural cast that is unfortunately all but unheard of in a fantasy movie. The Murry family, whom Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle book series is based on, will be a mixed-race family in the film, with a white father and a black mother. They recently cast the protagonist, Meg, and now it’s been announced that her mother will be played by Beyond the Lights and Black Mirror star Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens underwent a bunch of reshoots, as is the norm for blockbusters these days, and while, at the time, those reshoots were mostly kept a mystery, now some news has come out about one key scene in particular. Apparently J.J. Abrams and Ava DuVernay are good friends (who knew??) and frequently trade footage and screeners back and forth to one another to get some notes and suggestions. And one very important scene in The Force Awakens probably would not have been as cool without DuVernay’s guiding hand.

Ava DuVernay‘s latest documentary, ‘13th,’ couldn’t be arriving at a more relevant time. Urgent, angry and unflinching, the documentary looks at the current state of mass incarceration and police militarization, attempting to understand why the United States contains 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, which today is 2.3 million people. Opening this Friday just weeks after the largest prison strike in U.S. history, a month shy of the 2016 Presidential Election, and following a year full of harrowing violence against the black community, ‘13th’ feels like essential viewing now more than ever.

What if America is still living in an era of slavery? What if the abolition of slavery led to a collective consciousness that aligned people of color with definitions of criminality? That’s the argument Ava DuVernay’s latest documentary ‘The 13th’ makes, suggesting that for over a hundred and fifty years a societal behavior has developed where slavery can still exist under the guise of the mass incarceration.