The Film Stage

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 Sundance coverage. Plainclothes opens in theaters on September 19. Set years before George Michael’s arrest and inspired by the bathroom raids that provoked a moral panic in Mansfield, Ohio,...

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2024 BFI London coverage. The Summer Book opens in theaters on September 19. In Charlie McDowell’s last feature, Windfall, the ambitious (though largely unsuccessful) idea was to put the audience...

Reflecting on Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis a year later, after all the memes, hyperbolic hitpieces, and even some admiring reviews, it’s likely public opinion has solidified around it being a failure, both financially and artistically. Akin to the drubbing Coppola...

If one finds it a bit hard to endure feature-length works by Yorgos Lanthimos these days, he may have found his ideal mode of expression in (certainly well-paying) commercials. His latest project finds him teaming with Prada for a new...

If there’s a thread running through Kogonada’s films to date, it’s his distinct fascination with spare, deeply human character studies unfolding within meticulously designed worlds. As a sweeping, romantic fantasy, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is less grounded than the...

In remembrance of the legendary Robert Redford, we’re resharing this conversation from 2024 on his extraordinary career and most overlooked performances. Welcome to The B-Side, from The Film Stage. Here we talk about movie stars! Not the movies that made...

In a late contender for series of the year, New York’s Japan Society has given programming carte blanche to Shiguéhiko Hasumi––a critic, theorist, and scholar who also served as mentor to Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The result is Shiguéhiko Hasumi: Another History...

Grown from the seed of wartime screenings held by Mirsad Purivatra and Izeta Građević in the early ’90s, no festival in the world wears its history on its sleeve quite like Sarajevo. The city was still under siege when citizens...

In The Lost Bus, the latest propulsive and sweat-inducing disaster thriller from Paul Greengrass, a few electric sparks from a major power line hit dry weeds and spread into an uncontainable wildfire that mercilessly engulfs Paradise, California. The town’s name boasts...

It’s a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for Steve (Cillian Murphy). As the headmaster at Stanton Wood, a boarding school for troubled young men, he shows up to work and is greeted by bickering students, physical altercations, and...