After the Wedding

These two ferociously talented women are just too good to miss at any time and together they are a powerhouse. There's a lovely restraint here and those of you familiar with the original will, I'm sure, welcome the flip from male to female protagonists.

File under decent, but disappointing and start seeking out the excellent Danish original.

She [Moore] is simply superb, and while the film doesn’t reach her levels of excellence (pacing issues hurt, and some of the plot twists smack a little too hard), it gets close enough, bravely exploring the big issues of family, responsibility, class division, white privilege, and mortality.

A supreme example of classed-up mediocrity, "After the Wedding," a pointless remake of Susanne Bier's 2007 melodrama of the same name, offers little that's new and a lot that's predictable, even to first-time viewers.

Writer-director Bart Freundlich's American remake of Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier's Oscar-nominated 2006 family drama is curiously bloodless, despite the enticing tweak of gender-reversing the primary roles.

After a point, the twists come so steadily that I actually found myself holding my breath for long stretches - despite the fact that I know the original well - eager to see how key revelations would play out within this new dynamic.

We're waiting for this pressure cooker of a scenario to go nuclear and spill gunk all over the pretty, expensive stuff. It never quite happens and, for all the actors' impeccable restraint, something is missing.

It would be difficult to invest in if not for its two main stars who work hard to elevate the overly engineered plot, filling in the emotional gaps left by the haphazard script.

For a film punctuated with emotion... After the Wedding sadly doesn't provoke much within the viewer.

Freundlich's American remake of the Bier film flips the gender of the main characters, yielding predictably strong performances from Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams but otherwise removing the teeth...