Tell It Like A Woman (2022)

I did not love this movie, but I liked it in the way that you might enjoy a documentary--something that tells hard truths in a somewhat jarring way without sparing the audience's feelings in the process. It was nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Song, which it did not win, but that is how it got on my radar. The film is actually seven stories in one. In the first, Jennifer Hudson stars as an incarcerated mother with substance abuse and mental health issues. In the second, Marcia Gay Harden plays a doctor who helps a woman (Cara Delevingne) with schizophrenia and no home. In the third, Eva Longoria travels to Italy to bury her sister, only to find that she's been assigned as guardian for a niece she didn't know she had. In the fourth, Anne Watanabe plays an overworked mother whose kids do something nice for her. In the fifth, Margherita Buy plays a veterinarian put in a position to help an abused woman. In the sixth, Jacqueline Fernandez stars as an unhappy plastic surgeon who lets go of her pursuit of perfection after meeting a trans woman. The seventh is an animated film where alien-like creatures, forced to repeat gender stereotypes playing on televisions in surveilled concrete cells, are liberated.