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...

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Sundance Review: The 40 Year Old Version

by Murtada Elfadl

You love to see a star being born in a festival screening. Specially when that star is over 40, wrote and directed their own star vehicle after years of being ignored. It’s the ultimate artistic dream, to find inspiration from something very personal to you, yet have others respond to it. Remember the name Radha Blank because The 40 Year Old Version is only the beginning for her.

Blank plays a version of herself, a New York playwright nearing her 40th birthday and still struggling to find a place for herself and her art in the city...

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"Ema" at Sundance

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

Chilean director Pablo Larraín was last at the Sundance Film Festival with frequent collaborator Gael García Bernal in 2013 for the Oscar-nominated No. Since then, he’s earned two additional bids from the Golden Globes in the foreign language category for The Club and Neruda. He even made his first film in English: Jackie. Now, Larraín is back with another Bernal film, showing in the Spotlight section after its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival.

Though Bernal plays a substantial role, this film is all about actress Mariana Di Girolamo. She stars as the title character, who is married to Bernal’s choreographer character...

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Sundance Review: Nine Days

by Murtada Elfadl

There’s a very fine between profound and superficial, what is genuinely revelatory and what is obvious. It’s a line that writer / director Edson Oda straddles in his sweeping drama about the meaning of life (yep, I know), Nine Days. Unfortunately to these eyes he ultimately falls on obvious and unearned, while asking the audience to believe it’s profound.  

Oda pulls us into a world wholly conceived by him. A man named Will (Winston Duke) who used to be alive now watches VHS tapes of people going on about their lives. When someone dies he gets nine days to interview unliving souls for the vacant position of a new life on earth...

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Nicole Beharie is "Miss Juneteenth"

Murtada Elfadl reporting from Sundance..

Beauty pageant films are a genre into themselves used to tell many different stories. As when a filmmaker wants to tell a heartwarming story about female ambition (Miss Firecracker) or a satire about striving for perfection (Drop Dead Gorgeous). Sometimes they even debut at Sundance (Little Miss Sunshine). The latest in this tradition is Writer/Director Channing Godfrey Peoples’ Miss Juneteenth which focuses on mother-daughter beauty pageant contestants. However i don't think we've seen one as Black or as enmenshed in specific traditions as this one.

Nicole Beharie (Shame, 42, and TV's Sleepy Hollow) stars as Turquoise Joines. She was once Miss Juneteenth, a title commemorating the day slaves in Texas were freed, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. As every character in the film keeps telling her constantly -- how rude -- she has not lived up to the promise of her teen years...

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