Sundance: Julianne Moore in the American remake of "After the Wedding"

Abe Fried-Tanzer reporting from Sundance

Danish director Susanne Bier won an Oscar for her incredible film In a Better World (2010), her second time contending for Best Foreign Language Film. The first was her equally involving and magnetic After the Wedding (2006). That earlier film is actually one of two popular foreign hits remade for US audiences with Julianne Moore in the lead role this year (recent Oscar winner Sebastián Lelio remade his own 2013 Chilean film Gloria as Gloria Bell, due in March this year). Taking over Bier’s duties on this other do-over is Moore’s husband Bart Freundlich, whose last film was the underrated 2016 Tribeca entry Wolves. In addition to bringing this story back on the screen, this is a reunion for the real-life couple with leading man Billy Crudup after the three of them collaborated on both World Traveler (2001) and Trust the Man (2005).

What’s most changed – of surprisingly few modifications overall – from the Danish original to the 2019 remake that premiered at Sundance are the genders...

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Sundance: Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling in "Late Night"

The Film Experience has two contributors at Sundance this year, Murtada and Abe. Here's Murtada's first missive, on a film that's currently closing a record Sundance deal with Amazon -Editor.

by Murtada Elfadl

Emma Thompson plays legendary late night talk show host Katherine Newbery (think Letterman, 2 decades younger, English and a woman but just as famous and revered and still on TV) in the new comedy Late Night. Early in the film Newbery meets a male employee from the writers room who is asking for a raise because he recently had a baby. In two minutes Thompson eviscerates him, and all of the decades of sexism and inequality in the workplace. She likens having babies to having a drug problem that one can’t shake. The latter is an unexpected and illogical simile until, that is, you hear it coming out of Thompson’s mouth. The writing’s funny and sharp, and Thompson is on full throttle hilarious commitment. Late Night has a few more of these golden moments, but also a few that are clichéd...

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Sundance: "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley"

The Film Experience has two contributors at Sundance this year, Murtada and Abe. So here's your first of several reports. -Editor

Alex Gibney discussing his new doc on opening night of Sundance 2019

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

One of the first films to premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival comes from renowned documentarian Alex Gibney, who has previously taken on the Catholic Church, Scientology, Enron, and Lance Armstrong. He won an Oscar for his exposé on torture practices in the disturbing Taxi to the Dark Side (2007). It’s fair, at this point in his filmography, to assume that whatever Gibney wants to spotlight is going to be interesting.

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley tells the recent story of young entrepeneur Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos, which launched with the promise of performing over 200 medical tests using just a tiny drop of blood...

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Say A Prayer For "Serenity"

by Jason Adams

Although I don't think it's ever spoken in the film it's hard not to have the "Serenity Prayer" -- God grant me the serenity, wisdom, change, courage, check and etc -- echoing in your cavernous, more cavernous by the second, head while watching Serenity, writer-director Steven Knight's nervous-breakdown-put-to-film. Starring Matthew McConaughey as the hard-drinking and hard-sexing good ol' boy in paradise called Baker Dill (and really we all knew it was only a matter of time before Matthew McConaughey played a character called "Baker Dill" right?) watching Serenity is, well, an experience that calls for prayer. Any prayer. An exorcism, even.

I realize at this point, with these balls-deep references to demon possessions and nervous breakdowns, you're probably thinking that Serenity sounds like a miserable experience. It's not...

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Double Feature: On the Basis of Sex & RBG

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

It’s not uncommon for documentaries and narrative features about the same subject to be released around the same time. In some cases, the impetus for a narrative film comes from the success of a documentary, as with recent Robert Zemeckis' movies the The Walk and Welcome to Marwen, which told the same stories as the hit docs Man on Wire  and Marwencol, respectively. 2010 saw concurrent releases of documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money and the feature Casino Jack.

This season's double feature is undeniably inspired by the need to champion strong women in the face of divisive times. Who better than civil rights icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second female justice appointed to the Supreme Court, to serve as the figurehead for two very different movies in 2018?

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