‘Sharp Stick’ Review: Lena Dunham’s Third Major Act Is Her First Disappointment

NEW YORK -- Julia Garner admits to feeling “intimidated” when she met Anna Sorokin — who posed as a German heiress in New York society named Anna Delvey — and was later convicted of fraud.Garner portrays Sorokin in the new Shonda Rhimes series for Netflix, “Inventing Anna,” debuting Friday. What surprised Garner at that prison meeting? Sorokin was likable.“I just really wanted to get her energy,” said Garner. “What was coming across — that I didn’t expect — was how bubbly she was, how charming.”Garner walked away with insight into just how Sorokin was able to pull off her schemes.“When I got out of that visit, I was like, ’Wow, that’s why she was so close in getting everything that she wanted.

Jurassic World Dominion has landed, and shows how humans have come to live in fear alongside dinosaurs all over the world.Dominion, which is the third installment in the Jurassic World trilogy and the finale to the entire Jurassic Park saga to date, arrives in UK and US cinemas on June 10.In the first official trailer, we see events unfolding four years after the conclusion to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018). Since the establishment of a neo-Jurassic age at the end of that film – a world in which humans and dinosaurs co-exist – it’s clear that the plan has backfired and humans become dinosaurs’ prey and playthings.Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard star as dino-whisperer Owen Grady and ex Jurassic Park operations manager Claire Dearing respectively.

Utopia has taken U.S. rights to writer-director-producer Lena Dunham’s latest directorial Sharp Stick which made its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. A theatrical release is planned for later this year.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorLena Dunham’s Sundance entry “Sharp Stick” has been acquired by small indie distributor Utopia for U.S. rights.

Utopia has acquired the U.S. rights to writer-director-producer Lena Dunham’s Sundance comedy “Sharp Stick,” which follows a young woman’s unexpected quest of sexual exploration and self-discovery, Utopia announced on Monday.Utopia will release the film theatrically in the U.S.

Continuing the ongoing crush of gaming M&A, Sony Interactive Entertainment said it’s agreed to buy Bungie, an independent videogame developer and longtime Sony partner behind the Halo and Destiny franchises, for $3.6 billion.

Lena Dunham got a little help from her friends! For her new movie,, the star tells  that she asked Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn for their help, which is why they are given a Thank You credit at the end of the film.«They are just really great friends of mine who watched a really early cut of the film and gave me notes,» Dunham says of Swift, who was a bridesmaid in her wedding, and her actor boyfriend. «They’re both just really interesting, perceptive people. Taylor’s been one of my close friends for a really long time and Joe is an actor who I actually ended up working with on a project that I shot just a few months after this.», directed and written by Dunham and starring Kristine Froseth, Jon Bernthal and Luka Sabbat, follows Sarah Jo, a naive 26-year-old living on the fringes of Hollywood with her mother and sister.

Elizabeth Wagmeister Senior CorrespondentAfter Lena Dunham’s new movie “Sharp Stick” was criticized on Twitter by an autism activist who claimed she was approached to be a consultant on the project, the filmmaking team behind the Sundance film says that the central character, Sarah Jo, was never written to be on the spectrum. Producers say the drama about a young woman’s sexual awakening was inspired entirely by creator Lena Dunham’s personal journey, dealing with severe endometriosis which resulted in a hysterectomy.“Sarah Jo was never written nor imagined as a neurodivergent woman,” a spokesperson for the film says, in part, in a statement to Variety.

Lena Dunham is giving fans some insight into her new movie Sharp Stick!

Lena Dunham is sharing her thanks for Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn.

The Janes,” “Call Jane” and “Aftershock“). It’s a complex topic to be sure, which Dunham and her cast enthusiastically embraced.

in a post-screening Q&A, Dunham ran down its many high-minded inspirations. She said she wanted to “give porn its due as something that can be really healing.” And, as a woman who can’t have biological children due to a hysterectomy, Dunham, 35, wished to tell a story about “what it means to make your own family and design your own family and how that’s just as meaningful.” Yes, it is. But does that beautiful message come during the scene when the 26-year-old main character Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) scrawls an A-to-Z list of sex acts on colorful construction paper that she’d like to try out with randos? Or when her mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh) gives a vocab lesson on a crude nickname for the male anatomy? Sarah Jo’s sister Treina (Taylour Paige) is adopted, true, but the world is already in universal agreement that adoption is a great thing to do.

Playing in the Premieres section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Sharp Stick,” produced during lockdown, was conceived by Lena Dunham and the film’s director of photography, Ashley Connor, starting from the base elements that were already available to them — namely a set of actors and locations. But while many quarantine-made films have appeared to embrace a “will this do?” aesthetic, implicitly relying on the audience’s sympathy and compassionate understanding to fill gaps and forgive compromises in production value, Dunham has instead created a work of art that comfortably fits within and plays with the limitations imposed by the pandemic.

Lena Dunham hasn’t made a feature film since Tiny Furniture 12 years ago, but she has some plausible excuses—running Girls for six seasons, conceiving another series, writing two books, acting here and there. It took the pandemic to get her behind the camera again and, low and behold, the resulting film is about people living in very close quarters, not going out much and, at least for some, having a lot of sex. Sharp Stick brims over with the energy of young people who wanted to make something, quickly and down and dirty. The result is an invigorating film about a beautiful woman who, in her mid-20s, sheds her lifelong avoidance of sex to dive into the deep end. The FilmNation production is making its world premiere in the Premieres section of this year’s festival.

iveté of Alana Haim’s Alana Kane in “Licorice Pizza.” Sarah Jo is placed as a caregiver in the family of Zach (Liam Michel Saux), his hip, white-dude-who-raps, stay-at-home dad, Josh (Jon Bernthal), and nagging, very pregnant realtor mom, Heather (Dunham). When Treina, through a little social-media sleuthing, catches her man hanging out with his ex’s cousin at Universal Studios, Marilyn offers this advice: “You wanna know if he is really yours? You look him in the eye and you say, ‘Do you find me beautiful?’ It’s foolproof . . .