Daily updates from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

The Ugly Stepsister inverts Cinderella into a gross-out social satire filled with body horror gags and lush décor.

Our first Sundance 2025 dispatch highlights By Design, The Ugly Stepsister, Dead Lover, and The Things You Kill.

Norwegian writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt’s grotesque reworking of the Cinderella story creates a world where beauty is pain for some women, but life is ...

In her Sundance-bowing feature, the director Emilie Blichfeldt reimagines the fairytale from the perspective of a stepsister desperate for beauty.

Review: Emilie Blichfeldt's feminist body horror fairytale 'The Ugly Stepsister' isn't more than skin deep, but it's squeamish enough that way.

Director Emilie Blichfeldt puts the grim back in the Brothers Grimm with revolting close-ups of body modifications, maggots and moulting

Larry Mantle and LAist film critics Amy Nicholson and Manuel Betancourt review this weekend’s latest movie releases in theaters and on streaming platforms.

Emilie Blichfeldt flips the script with The Ugly Stepsister , focusing on the naive Elvira (Lea Myren), who is presented as a slightly gawky but generally…

Imagine, if you will, if Cinderella wasn't so lovely.

And Jon Hamm is brilliant once again in “Your Friends and Neighbors.’

The Ugly Stepsister is an audaciously gross reimagining of a tale old as time, but one that cleverly inverts perspective and expectation.

Blichfieldt's "burn it all down" approach creates turbulence and upset while walking over very well-trod ground.

On two of the crazier opening night premieres of this year's Sundance.

Yes, let’s have a “Cinderella” without the spin. Pound home the “princess” as beauty bias messaging with body horror driven by body dysphoria. And ...

The Cinderella fairytale is turned violently on its head in this gory Norwegian debut

The film's carefully calibrated camera placement, sound design, and editing rhythm align spectator and subject in mutual agony and anxiety.

“The Ugly Stepsister” just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Turns out beauty really is pain.

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 Sundance coverage. The Ugly Stepsister opens in theaters on April 18. If the disheartening lac...

The Friend (15) 123mins ★★☆☆☆ THE tale of a reluctant owner falling in love with a problematic pooch has played out many times on the big screen. T...

This horror based on Cinderella features a scene so graphic our critic couldn’t watch it. The rest, though, is provocative and beguiling

Sundance 2025: Emilie Blichfeldt's feature debut "The Ugly Stepsister" is a grim and gruesome affair not for the faint of heart

Director Emilie Blichfeldt skewers unfair female beauty standards in a horrific spin on the fairy tale, presented here from the rival's perspective.

Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister underlines the base grotesquerie of the original fairy tale.