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Cocaine Bear, Elizabeth Banks' third directorial feature, is a wild sequence of events that begins with a drug smuggler dumping their product across a forest in Georgia. When a 500-pound black bear discovers and consumes a duffel bag full of cocaine everyone in the forest is in danger. The bear goes on a murderous, coke-fueled rampage, with locals and tourists scrambling to survive while a local mother searches for her missing daughter and two drug dealers try to recover the lost product.

Shockingly Cocaine Bear was inspired by a real story where a bear discovered and consumed cocaine that a drug smuggler had dumped. However, the bear did not go on a rampage and instead died of an overdose shortly after eating the cocaine. Cocaine Bear features an impressive cast with Alden Ehrenreich, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Ray Liotta, Keri Russell, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and Margo Martindale.

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An interview with Elizabeth Banks in the New York Times tied to the release of her new film Call Jane turned for a time into an exploration of an older film Banks directed, Charlie’s Angels.

Banks called it “a long conversation that I don’t know that I want to get into.”

Pressed by interviewer David Marchese, Banks offered that she is proud of the movie and the actors in it. She then pushed back on what she sees as a narrative that has developed about the film.

“There was a story around Charlie’s Angels that I was creating some feminist manifesto. I was just making an action movie,” Banks said plainly. “I would’ve liked to have made Mission: Impossible, but women aren’t directing Mission: Impossible. I was able to direct an action movie, frankly, because it starred women and I’m a female director, and that is...

Elizabeth Banks is calling out an industry double standard.

After writing, directing, producing, and starring in 2019’s “Charlie’s Angels” reboot, Banks reflected on the film’s box-office flop in an interview with The New York Times.

“I would’ve liked to have made ‘Mission: Impossible,’ but women aren’t directing ‘Mission: Impossible,'” Banks said. “I was able to direct an action movie, frankly, because it starred women and I’m a female director, and that is the confine right now in Hollywood.”

Banks claimed that a “big producer of big action movies” once told her directly that she “couldn’t direct action, that male actors were not going to follow me.”

“He was flummoxed at the idea that a woman would be able to lead the Rock on a CGI screen, I guess?” Banks said.

For “Charlie’s Angels,” Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott, and Ella Balinska starred in the film as the core trio,...