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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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...

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Sundance Awards (Plus Abe's 'Jury of One' Wrap)

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

Minari won Sundance

The Sundance Film Festival is officially over, closing out yet another busy week and a half of nonstop movies. I managed to catch 41 films this year, including almost all the Premieres titles and most of the U.S. Dramatic Competition films. I enjoyed running into Murtada a few times and noting how much we disagreed on a few films (one of his least favorites is on my top ten list, and I hated Zola, which he loved).

After the jump, the official awards and the best of what I saw... 

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A Funny Time Loop in "Palm Springs"

Abe Fried-Tanzer nearing the end of Sundance 2020...

Time loops are cool again thanks to all the hoopla around Russian Doll, but, in the same way that experiencing the same day over and over again gets stale after a while, has the phenomenon been explored enough at this point? Hulu and Neon certainly didn’t think so when they set a Sundance record by spending $17.5 million (and 69 cents) for Palm Springs, a comedy that deals with the topic yet again...

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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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