Sundance Review: Promising Young Woman

by Murtada Elfadl

Carey Mulligan is an actress of immense range. Since her breakout at the 2009 edition of Sundance with An Education, she’s given us many tremendous performances. All of them heartbreaking and deeply felt in different ways, whether she’s a replicant trying to make human connections (Never Let Me Go), F Scott Fitzgerald’s famous Daisy (The Great Gatsby), a broken sister singing her heart out as a last cry for help (Shame) or a wife and mother facing the dissolution of her marriage and the paucity of choices after (Wildlife). And once again she gives an exceptional performance in Promising Young Woman.

This time she’s Cassie, who at 30 still lives home with her parents (Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge), whiles her days away working in a coffee shop where even the boss (Laverene Cox) thinks the job is beneath her. Little by little we find out the reason for her apathy. An event that happened during college made her dropout and become a sorta avenger against “nice guys” who take advantage of vulnerable women...

Click to read more ...

1999 with Nick: Best Original Score

This week, in advance of the 2019 Oscars, Nick Davis is looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now...

the surprise winner

Spotlight Movie: The Red Violin
One of the most exciting things that can happen on Oscar night is when a movie with no other nominations wins one of the “craft” or “technical” or “below-the-line” categories—three bad names for the races where very few contenders are celebrities. In a year like the current one, where the Best Picture nominees ran the table to a historic degree, and consuming most of the spots in every other race, we have even fewer prospects than usual to see this occur. I’d love to watch The Lighthouse win Cinematography or Ad Astra win Sound Mixing, both because they deserve these victories on merit and because it’s nice (but mostly false) to hope that Oscar voters make discerning judgments from category to category based on each discrete department of artistry.

The Red Violin’s Best Original Score trophy at the 1999 Oscars represented one of these glorious instances, and registered as a significant upset at the time...

Click to read more ...

Almost There: Lana Turner in "The Bad and the Beautiful"

This week The Film Experience will be celebrating Lana Turner for her Centennial. Here's Cláudio Alves

According to legend, Lana Turner was discovered in 1936, when she happened to be spotted by the publisher of The Hollywood Report while drinking a Coke at Schwab's Pharmacy. As with most myths of the cinematic Olympus, the story is unlikely to be true, though that doesn't take away from the allure of the actress. Whatever her origin story, Turner appeared in her first film the following year and quickly became one of Hollywood's most beloved sirens, an icon of glamor and sensuality, a megawatt star the likes of which we haven't seen in decades. 

Despite it all, stardom doesn't necessarily equal prestige. Turner was often seen as little more than a pretty face and her acting craft was underappreciated. In 1957, a conflagration of many scandals, personal and literary, secured her a single Oscar nomination for Peyton Place. That wasn't the first time she was in the running for awards, however...

Click to read more ...

LGBTQ Highlights from Sundance

Here's Ren Jender filing her final report from Sundance 2020...

Tabitha Jackson and Kirsten JohnsonSundance didn't have a big queer film this year, as they have in many previous years (most recently in 2018, when director Desiree Akhavan's The Miseducation of Cameron Post won the Grand Jury Dramatic Prize) but with this year's awards came the news that a black, queer woman, Tabitha Jackson, would take over from outgoing, longtime Sundance Film Festival Director John Cooper. Jackson also made news on the first day of the festival when she married documentary director Kirsten Johnson (Johnson's Dick Johnson is Dead, was a favorite among many critics and audiences at Sundance this year), and they jointly announced that Johnson would no longer be submitting her films to the festival during her spouse's tenure. 

Sam Feder's Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen premiered on Monday. The film is a documentary in the tradition of The Celluloid Closet, which included clips of queer characters in films and commentary on those characters by writers, actors and filmmakers...

Click to read more ...

Weekend Box Office

It was a quiet weekend at the box office with both new wide releases (horror film Gretel and Hansel and revenge thriller The Rhythm Section) opening softly, apart from a few noteworthy monetary marks for indie films...

Weekend Box Office January 31st through February 2nd (ESTIMATES) 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
WIDE RELEASE (800+ screens)	PLATFORM TITLES
"Gretel and Hansel"	Oscar Nominated Short Film "Hair Love"
1 BAD BOYS FOR LIFE  $17.6 (cum. $148)	1 🔺 OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS $1.0 on 460  screens *NEW* THE CHARTS ★
2 1917  $9.6 (cum. $119.2) THE ACTING,  CONTINUOUS SHOT ★	2 THE LAST FULL MEASURE $519k on 617 screens (cum. $2.0)
3 DOLITTLE $7.7 (cum. $55.2) THIS ODD FRANCHISE	3 WEATHERING WITH YOU $405k on 224 screens (cum. $7.2) REVIEW  ★

Click to read more ...