The Film Stage

So much of filmmaking and film-watching boils down to either lending your eyes to another or accepting that loan as a viewer––a process so quick, so immediate when done right that one can easily forget it’s about exchanging consent. To...

After directing not only the best debut of 2022, but the best film of that year, with the emotionally piercing, structurally captivating Aftersun, we’ve long awaited word on what the next feature from Charlotte Wells would be. It now seems...

For all the glories that Romanian cinema has enjoyed in the last quarter-century, 2026 has the potential to outshine them all. If one man will be responsible for this, it is probably Sebastian Stan, an American mega-star of Romanian extraction...

The characters in Kelly Reichardt’s films drift and wander. Her leads often work their way through the world, struggling against bad impulses and worse decisions, attempting to find community, solace, or calm. They’re working-class people on the margins, not remarkable...

The stories of Star Wars‘ creation are nearly (sometimes more) compelling than the films themselves––personal ambition, institutional politics, and empires (the evil of which is in the eye of the beholder) bearing a strange mirror to the dealings in a...

For as long as there have been relationships, there have also been affairs. It is perhaps one of the most durable narrative devices, so universal that just about anyone can find a perspective into such a story. To this, Elizabeth...

Restorations and retrospectives are plentiful enough that it’s hard to believe Oliver Assayas’ early career bears no imprint on American film culture. While certain pre-Cold Water titles could be obtained if one looks hard enough, 1991’s Paris Awakens and 1993’s...

The world has long needed a memoir from Abel Ferrara, and now we’ve got one, along with smart studies of the lives and careers of Clint Eastwood, Jonathan Demme, and Ed Wood. Plus, a stunning exploration of The Crow and...

“Klara remembered who she was. She pulled away from the window and she was a sculptor, although she didn’t always believe it, an artist––she believed them sometimes when they said she wasn’t.”— Don DeLillo, Underworld It is early into Kent...

Hlynur Pálmason’s fourth feature marks a soft, Malickian left turn for the man behind the icy-bleak dramas Winter Brothers, A White, White Day, and Godland. Up against the rest of Pálmason’s oeuvre––which weighs viewers down with a grave obstinance, whether...