<\/p>\n
For years, the regeneration of older men has dominated our screens. Liam Neeson<\/a> may have become the king of the \u201cgeriaction\u201d drama in 2008 with \u201cTaken\u201d (and has had a death grip on the crown, with dozens of other high-octane films since then), but men of a certain age are always being dragged into second and third acts, invariably panting, \u201cI\u2019m getting too old for this,\u201d as they scramble to save the girl\/their marriage\/the world. As with so many types of roles, it took Hollywood some time before creators and execs realized women could do the same \u2014 Jamie Lee Curtis in the 2018 sequel \u201cHalloween,\u201d<\/a> Michelle Yeoh in an Oscar-winning turn in \u201cEverything Everywhere All at Once,\u201d Helen Mirren in \u201cRed\u201d and \u201c1923,\u201d and Viola Davis in \u201cThe Woman King.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n Now the growing army of 60-ish women who kick ass, take names and rarely complain about getting too old for anything has been joined by Emma Thompson\u2019s Zo\u00eb Boehm in Apple TV\u2019s \u201cDown Cemetery Road,\u201d out Wednesday, and the menopausal punk rockers of Sally Wainwright\u2019s \u201cRiot Women,\u201d which is expected to debut in the U.S. on Britbox early next year and launched a few weeks ago on BBC One. Between the two, it is safe to say we have entered a next phase of female rebellion \u2014 Culture Wars: Rise of the Crones.<\/p>\n Based on the novel series by Mick Herron (who also gave us \u201cSlow Horses\u201d<\/a>), \u201cDown Cemetery Road\u201d follows the adventures of Sarah Tucker (Ruth Wilson), an Oxford art conservationist whose life is upended by an explosion on a neighboring street that may not have been an accident. Convinced that the young girl who survived is being disappeared, she enlists the aid of a local PI firm, run by Joe Silverman (Adam Godley) and his wife Zo\u00eb Boehm (Thompson).<\/p>\n Tough where her husband is soft, jaded where he is open-minded, Zo\u00eb initially thinks Sarah\u2018s case is a waste of time \u2014 she wants Joe to focus on collecting all the fees he has let slide instead of haring off to aid another \u201cdamsel in distress.\u201d But when Zo\u00eb is forced by circumstance to look into the case, she reveals herself to be fearless, dogged and street-smart, as noir an investigator as Oxford is likely to get.<\/p>\n There have been more than a few female detectives of a certain age \u2014 Miss Marple, Jessica Fletcher, Vera Stanhope \u2014 but none have ever been as \u201cno-effs-given\u201d 60-plus aspirational as Zo\u00eb. She\u2019s got a shock of silver hair (that should inspire a \u201cthe Zo\u00eb\u201d haircut), a long black leather coat with matching combat boots, an active extramarital sex life and a directness that could be considered rude if she were the type of person who would waste her time on rudeness, which she clearly is not. Zo\u00eb is about two decades younger in Herron\u2019s books.<\/p>\n Several narratives thread through \u201cDown Cemetery Road\u201d \u2014 this being from Herron, it isn\u2019t surprising that corrupt and inept government officials are trying to cover up a crime with more crime, much of it quite violent. Sarah finds herself thrown together with former soldier Mark Downey (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) who also wants to find the little girl while eluding assassin Amos (Fehinti Balogun).<\/p>\n Stewart-Jarrett is terrific but the show is strongest when it focuses on the women, separately and together. Wilson\u2019s Sarah is heroic, particularly given her self-doubting nature and quasi-maternal motives, but Thompson makes Zo\u00eb, for all her failings and regrets, an instant icon.<\/p>\n Fresh off her first action-hero role in the \u201cDead of Winter\u201d<\/a> (where she follows in Jodie Foster\u2019s icy \u201cTrue Detective: Night Country\u201d<\/a> footsteps), Thompson has shaken off whatever remained of her Jane Austen\/Merchant Ivory niceties. In \u201cDead of Winter,\u201d her grieving Barb is an accidental (if gritty and determined) hero. With Zo\u00eb, she offers a generational battle cry: \u201cRise my post-menopausal sisters and fight; you have nothing to lose but your culturally imposed feelings of irrelevance.\u201d<\/p>\n Which is pretty much the theme of \u201cRiot Women.\u201d<\/p>\n Creator Sally Wainwright (\u201cHappy Valley,\u201d \u201cGentleman Jack,\u201d \u201cLast Tango in Halifax\u201d) has devoted her entire career to conjuring complicated, resonant and terrific female characters in all life stages. \u201cRiot Women\u201d is, in many ways, a distillation of her oeuvre. When pub owner Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne) suggests to a few of her friends that they form a band, she\u2019s imagining a half-serious one-off performance at a fundraiser for refugees at her grandchildren\u2019s school.<\/p>\n But the women she\u2019s asked are all in varying degrees of troubled transition, including but not limited to haywire hormones. Holly (Tamsin Greig) has just retired from the police force, Holly\u2019s sister Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore) is a midwife nettled by an overburdened healthcare system and Beth (Joanna Scanlan) is a disaffected teacher who, having been ditched by her husband and ignored by her son, feels so invisible that she contemplates suicide.<\/p>\n For them, and the younger Kitty (Rosalie Craig), a substance abuser with little regard for the law, the band offers an unexpected chance to rekindle the vitality and passion that has been ground away by life and (with the exception of Kitty) the often overwhelming symptoms of insomnia, hot flashes, migraines and brain fog. When an ABBA cover is suggested, Beth rebels, pushing the group toward punk and original music, committing herself to the band as if her life depends on it. Which in her case, it does.<\/p>\n Their problems do not vanish, of course. The tension between Jess and her adult daughter quickly escalates to crisis. Holly and Yvonne\u2019s mother (played by the redoubtable Anne Reid) is disappearing into dementia. Beth latches onto Kitty in part to alleviate the isolation she feels, and Kitty\u2019s very poor impulse control may force her to jail, or worse.<\/p>\n But that is the whole point. When circumstance, and one\u2019s own body, seem to conspire against you, one can, as E.M. Forster said, \u201cOnly connect!\u201d To other like-minded souls, sure, but also to the inner punk warrior that is never too old to take action.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.latimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For years, the regeneration of older men has dominated our screens. Liam Neeson may have become the king of the \u201cgeriaction\u201d drama in 2008 with \u201cTaken\u201d (and has had a death grip on the crown, with dozens of other high-octane films since then), but men of a certain age are always being dragged into second […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2122318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2122317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Female-action-stars-are-getting-older-and-redefining-the-genre.com2Fab2F622Fbba4c01e483d83398d49a107.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2122317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2122319,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122317\/revisions\/2122319"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2122318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2122317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2122317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2122317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}