The Film Stage

Welcome to The B-Side! Here we talk about movie directors! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between.  Today we discuss Mike Leigh, one of our greatest living filmmakers....

To paraphrase Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis: Wasn’t I lucky to come of age in my favorite city? For one thing, my impressionable undergraduate years fell during J. Hoberman’s tenure as lead film critic of the Village...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here. The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett) Essentially a lost film, legendary director Charles Burnett’s...

I’ve spent my offline hours producing The Jag, a new play that runs from June 21 to July 6 at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research. Even without some of my fingerprints, this makes a curiously cinema-centered creative team: directed...

Anthony Dod Mantle has done more to advance digital photography than nearly any artist in any medium, a fact his humility rendered somewhat subtle during a career-spanning conversation I had the fortune of conducting in 2023. He could, nevertheless, casually...

Since its premiere at last year’s Locarno Film Festival, we’ve long-awaited the U.S. release of Ramon Zürcher’s The Sparrow in the Chimney, the trilogy-capper following the formally thrilling The Strange Little Cat and The Girl and the Spider. Starring Maren Eggert, Britta Hammelstein,...

You can say that Danny Boyle was once the filmmaking avatar of Cool Britannia: a director who, at age 40, still managed to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of 20-year-olds, as seen in Trainspotting. In the span of time between then...

Note: This review was originally published as part of our Venice 2024 coverage. Familiar Touch opens in theaters on June 20. In a sunny kitchen in California, Ruth prepares a sandwich with the muscle memory that only a lifetime allows....

Our decision to declare Miami Vice this century’s greatest action film some eight years ago was neither made lightly nor received unanimously, but fortune favors the bold. Part and parcel of its canonization, Michael Mann’s classic streams on Criterion this...

A workmanlike procedural that does more to suggest a Clint Eastwood drama than the kind of unhinged thriller one’s come to associate with great auteur Takashi Miike, Sham is surprisingly straightforward. The story follows a teacher accused of abusing a...