The Film Stage

Comprising 48 titles from 28 countries, this year’s Short Cuts program at the Toronto International Film Festival doesn’t represent any sort of significant change from 2024 (48 shorts but from 23 countries, so a little more geographic representation this time)....

The Smashing Machine is a movie with a lot of heart and soul. It’s also a movie with great love for its subjects: the people involved and, for better and worse, the industry they helped build. It’s inspired by a...

In April 2022, two months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Italian author and political writer Giuliano da Empoli published a fictionalized account of Vladimir Putin’s ascent as seen through the eyes of his advisor. The Wizard of Kremlin almost immediately...

Let’s start here: Billy Crudup is one of our truly great actors. Early into Jay Kelly, written by Noah Baumbach and Emily Mortimer and directed by Baumbach, Crudup appears for a one-scene turn that jump-starts the narrative. Over drinks, his...

Hamnet is a great work of empathy and the best film Chloé Zhao has made by quite a wide margin. Adapted from the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell, who returns here as co-writer, the film serves as a lovely reminder...

The films of Mark Jenkin ooze a hypnotic, seasick sensibility; to watch them is to be lulled by their restless jumps through time and space, their ability to convert his home turf of Cornwall into a suspended world where facts...

In the rather niche academic field of monster studies, the common understanding of monstrosity is very similar to that of queerness: through being “different,” a monster destabilizes historical notions of normality and normativity, exposing how fictitious they were in the...

Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) was born and bred San Francisco Giants baseball. Named after one of the most significant Giants in major league history––back when they were the New York Giants, a clever nod from writer Charlie Huston, who adapted...

About an hour into This is Not a Drill, the new documentary from director Oren Jacoby, comes a moment that is stark and unsettling. Sitting next to her daughter, Louisiana climate activist Roishetta Ozane asks what she thinks of the...

In Ballad of a Small Player, we are given the gift of Colin Farrell overdoing it. Nobody overdoes it like Colin Farrell, and to take this for granted is a disservice. Written by Rowan Joffé (based on Lawrence Osborne’s 2014...