Sundance Film Festival 2019: movie reviews and news

Why does Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile, starring Zac Efron as the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, exist?

I wish I could tell you. Director Joe Berlinger is clearly fascinated with Bundy, who brutalized at least 30 young women in the 1970s (prior to his execution in 1989, Bundy confessed to kidnapping, raping, and murdering many of his victims, the true number of which is unknown). In addition to this feature, Berlinger directed Netflix’s four-part documentary series Conversations With a Killer, which also centers on Bundy and heavily relies on recorded interviews he gave during his imprisonment in the 1980s.

Every week, new original films debut on Netflix and other streaming services, often to much less fanfare than their big-screen counterparts. Cinemastream is Vox’s series highlighting the most notable of these premieres, in an ongoing effort to keep interesting and easily accessible new films on your radar.

The premise: A trove of paintings is found in the apartment of a dead man, and the art world jumps into action to claim them and sell them. But the paintings seem to exert a curious — and maybe supernatural — force of their own. Carnage ensues.

Two years ago, the 2017 Sundance Film Festival kicked off in a world that had tilted on its axis. At this year’s event, that world was still spinning — and a few of the movies that played suggested it might keep doing so in the future.

Sundance takes place in conservative Utah, but the festival is hosted by Park City, about 40 minutes’ drive from Salt Lake City, where only 14 percent of residents voted for Donald Trump in 2016. And the community around Sundance and its programs is, on the whole, staunchly liberal — no huge shock, given the organization’s founder, Robert Redford, who has been an activist almost as long as he’s been an actor.

The first startling moment in Late Night comes when we realize that in the world of this movie, Katherine Newbury — a woman — has been hosting a late-night comedy show on a major TV network for nearly three decades, something no woman has actually done in our world.

But the second comes shortly thereafter, when Newbury (played by a pitch-perfect Emma Thompson), who’s faced with the threat of being replaced by a hot-shot young comedian (Ike Barinholtz) after 10 straight years of dropping ratings, is accused by her own producer (Denis O’Hare) of not liking women. Her writers’ room is stacked with white guys, some of whom were hired due to nepotism, most of whom have never interacted with Katherine directly, and in all her years as the show’s host, she’s never hired a female writer.

Is there anything left to say about Harvey Weinstein? The mogul’s name used to be synonymous with Oscars, box office success, and a bull-in-a-china-shop style of managing Hollywood talent and publicity. Now, 15 months after the stories that broke the dam, he’s a one-man avatar for the #MeToo movement, a potent symbol, and a pariah.

Weinstein has been so thoroughly reported on that it’s hard to imagine that a film could bring much more to his story. Indeed, Ursula Macfarlane’s new documentary Untouchable doesn’t go for shocking revelation ions or new insights. Anyone who’s followed the Weinstein story reasonably closely will know what’s coming, from Weinstein’s early career as a music promoter to his rise as a hotshot movie executive and his eventual downfall.

Jennifer Kent burst onto the film scene at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival with The Babadook, a psychological descent into the hell of grief and its effects on a desperate mother and her troubled child. The movie became an instant horror classic (and spawned all sorts of cheeky memes). And now, five years later, the Australian director is back with another devastating work about a grieving woman: The Nightingale.

It’s a carefully researched period piece set in 1825 about a young Irish convict, Clare (Aisling Franciosi), who has been sent to live out her sentence in remote Tasmania. She manages to marry and have a child, but she’s bound to serve an angry and sadistic young English officer named Hawkins (Sam Claflin), for whom her “duties” include working in the kitchen, singing for the soldiers, and being raped.