Sundance: Zora Howard in "Premature"

Murtada Elfadl reporting from Sundance

Once in a while, a film comes along where the actual experience of watching it is so enjoyable, it stirs a cozy reaction. A certain contentment, a satisfied smile washes over you as you spend time with the characters and the story. The type of film, the rhytyms, the stories that stir that reaction in me can differ but Rashaad Ernesto Green’s Premature is one of those movies.

The film follows Ayana (played by Zora Howard who co-wrote the screenplay with the director) through her last summer in Harlem before she leaves New York for college...

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Sundance: A whole new Shia Labeouf in "Honey Boy"

Abe Fried-Tanzer reporting from Sundance

Shia Labeouf and Noah Jupe, pictured at Sundance, play father and son in "Honey Boy"

Shia LaBeouf’s career hasn’t gone how anyone expected. At age fourteen, he was starring on the popular Disney comedy series Even Stevens. By the time he turned twenty-one, he anchored the movie Disturbia and then blew up as star of the Transformers franchise. More serious performances like the one he delivered in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and his bizarre forays into public self-reflection and public self-destruction provide contradictory images of the actor, who is now thirty-two. 

His best performance to date was in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, but he may just have outdone himself in his new picture, which he also wrote based on his own experiences. Honey Boy is the feature film debut from respected documentary filmmaker Alma Har’e (Bombay Beach) and LaBeouf is at first almost unrecognizable as a version of his own father...

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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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