Lila & Eve
Davis stars in this movie about Lila, a single mother whose son Stephon is killed in a drive-by shooting. When the police show little enthusiasm for solving the case, she joins a group of grieving mothers, where she connects with Eve (Jennifer Lopez), who has suffered a similar loss. The two set out to take revenge. The film is written by Pat Gilfillan and directed by Charles Stone III.
I completely drew on being a parent, and so did Jennifer. I have a friend, Julie Norris, who in 1988 lost a child to murder. She was a 7-year-old and she was playing in her grandma’s backyard in the middle of the day with her brothers and sisters and cousin. And her body was found and she’d been beaten, raped and strangled, and they found no clothes on her body. So I’ve been speaking to Julie as I was putting the project together. I always wanted to start from a place that’s real. The screenwriter spent two years with mothers of murdered children, and as a result, the experience felt like it was conveyed in a realistic way.
Doubt
Davis plays Mrs. Miller, the mother of a young boy enrolled in Catholic school, in this drama from John Patrick Shanley. Sister Aloysius Beauvier , the school’s principal, questions Father Flynn’s relationship with that student and recruits Sister James to monitor the priest’s actions. It is left up to the viewer to decide if her suspicions are correct or if she wants Father Flynn removed for her own reasons.
But I think it’s when Mrs. Miller comes in that you begin to understand that the argument isn’t just within these insular walls of this church, that it involves issues of rigid belief systems, and broadening your mind and your heart.
