Suffragette

It’s 1912 and Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan), a 26-year-old mother, is working as a laundress at a London factory, the same one she’s worked at since her early teens. Like the many other women in the sweltering warehouse, Maud works a third more hours than her husband (Ben Whishaw) and the other male employees, and makes considerably less. But this is the 20th century, a time where women were expected to do no more than birth children and bring home an income to feed those children. In Suffragette, screenwriter Abi Morgan (Shame, The Iron Lady) and director Sarah Gavron take us back to that era to remind us of the fight that eventually earned women the right to vote in the U.K. in 1928.

Suffragette doesn’t look like your average historical drama or biopic, even though it checks off a few of those boxes (heavily gray British period piece starring Meryl Streep) — no, this true story of the women’s suffrage movement looks intense and stunning, and the trailer alone is enough to make you want to get up and throw a rock through a window.