The Film Stage

It’s now been 30 years since Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg launched the Dogme 95 movement, featuring a set of stripped-down filmmaking rules to put power back in the hands of directors. While films such as Festen, The Idiots,...

Ferdinand Magellan was never regarded as a great man of history, and Lav Diaz’s surprisingly conventional––if still hypnotically paced––biopic uses genre structure to act as a further repudiation of his legacy. Born out of a long-in-the-works project focused on Magellan’s...

Near the climax of Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, two assassins––one well-dressed but dying, the other ragged but definitely alive––laid together on a kitchen floor, their hands lightly touching as Charlene’s “Never Been to Me” drifted in from...

Christian Petzold’s fifteenth feature Mirrors No. 3 marks his fourth with Paula Beer, the actor-muse he first directed in 2018’s Transit, a film that shares significant themes with his newest––chiefly that of total strangers inexplicably recognizing each other and immediately...

The laws of time and space are met with frisky ambivalence in Drunken Noodles, Lucio Castro’s anticipated third feature and surely the hottest title in this year’s ACID lineup. Most people familiar with the New York-based, Argentinian-born director first encountered...

When confronted with the past, do you drive away or turn back to face it? Siblings Ren (Kurosaki Kodai, in his first lead role) and Emi (Mai Kiryu) have been estranged from their father (Ken’ichi Endô) for the ten years...

Just three years since earning a special mention from the Camera d’Or jury for Plan 75, Chie Hayakawa returns to Cannes as one of seven filmmakers debuting in the main competition––an uncharacteristic breath of fresh air from a festival known...

Shot on black-and-white film with the same Cameflex model used by Jean-Luc Godard for Breathless––the film it portrays and embodies the making of––Nouvelle Vague is not merely an imitation of Godard. It’s a theft of Godard for a creation all...

In Eddington, Ari Aster’s latest doom spiral, the proposed building of a data center in nowhere New Mexico provides the catalyst for a long-overdue psychological breakdown. The man in question is Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), whose perceived list of...

Late into I Only Rest in the Storm, Sergio (Sérgio Coragem) is asked a question he can’t seem to answer: what do you care about? A Portuguese environmental engineer hired to evaluate the ecological impact of a massive road set...