An Interview with Writer/Director/Producer Penelope Lawson
We chat with Penelope Lawson about her short film, The Dinner Party, her experience founding her own production company, and fun cinema.

The chance meeting of a German and an American in a Berlin coffee house unravels their carefully constructed lives.
We chat with Penelope Lawson about her short film, The Dinner Party, her experience founding her own production company, and fun cinema.
This anti-love young adult movie includes mature topics and dialogue.
I write for a diversity-focused film review blog, so I’ll be honest: I really wanted to like Pretty Lethal. Starring Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, Avantika, and Millicent Simmonds, Amazon Prime’s new thriller seemed like it would be a girl power movie about dancers with a horror action twist. Sort of a Suspiria for teens. But with shallow and unlikeable characters, a confusing plot, an overreliance on violence, and cringey dialogue, any fun the movie started out with was quickly lost. What was left was a faint echo of greater horror movies about dancers made before.
But what many do not know is that in 2019, a Wonder Woman film was released that had all of the positive qualities of WW84, and remedied many of the negative ones. Wonder Woman: Bloodlines, a direct-to-video animated movie in the DC Animated Movie Universe, perfectly balances the campiness and seriousness of the character.
Mahavatar Narsimha (2025) brings the epic tale of Hiranyakashipu to life with stunning animation, intense action, and a bold retelling of this timeless mythological drama.