The Film Stage

Do you smell what The Rock is cooking? For the last decade-plus (at least post-Pain & Gain), Dwayne Johnson has been serving up four-quadrant blockbuster slop. Thankfully, he seems to be turning a new direction for The Smashing Machine, which...

When news broke last year of John Hillcoat adapting Blood Meridian, I had expressed some hope for similar treatment bestowed upon Cormac McCarthy’s final novels The Passenger and Stella Maris. This desire was almost entirely quixotic; his swan song is...

Jia Zhangke’s is often a cinema of déjà vu: “We’re again in the northern Chinese city of Datong,” Giovanni Marchini Camia wrote for Sight and Sound back in 2019, “it’s again the start of the new millennium, Qiao is again...

Scale, sweep, or schadenfreude; whatever you might be seeking in the films of Kevin Costner, you tend to walk away with the vistas. Think of the golden plains and stampeding buffalo of his directorial debut Dances with Wolves; or the...

Oh, to be one of the chosen. I guarantee this thought washes over every single person attending the Cannes Film Festival, at least at some point. It is a realization laden with ambivalence, as both an exclamation and a lament;...

There’s a lot to look forward to in what has been branded a Mexican comedy-thriller musical from the Palme d’Or winner that brought us Dheepan, A Prophet, Rust and Bone, and, more recently, the underseen Western delight that marked his...

While much of the Cannes Classics lineup this year look far back in cinema history, a new documentary in the lineup captures a behind-the-scenes look at a recent masterpiece. Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron is an expanded version of Kaku...

This one is for the true Lanthimites, the Dogtooth sisters, the biscuit women, The Killing of a Sacred Deer heads, a film to which the callbacks are so abundant that one can’t help but wonder what the connection is for...

If the perfect sports movie illuminates the fundamentals that make one fall in love with the game, there may be no better movie about baseball than Carson Lund’s Eephus. Structured solely around a single round of America’s national pastime, Lund’s...

The cinema of Paul Schrader has always felt like a confessional, all those dark rooms and troubled men, the registered Swiftie’s own tortured poets department. The confessional edges closer to the form in his latest film, Oh Canada, an august...