The Film Stage

The line “you did the best you could” is spoken at a crucial moment in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. It’s a platitude often used as a band-aid to cover up all manner of sins. But here, in writer-director-producer Scott...

Three years after Venice welcomed (and awarded the Golden Lion to) Laura Poitras’s documentary about artist and activist Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, another filmic portrait by the Academy Award-winning director graces the Lido. Cover-Up, co-directed by Poitras...

“It’s a fucking minefield, Alma,” the Dean of Humanities at Yale warns Julia Roberts’ Dr. Imhoff. Barely a few days have passed since her colleague, Hank (Andrew Garfield), has “crossed the line” with one of her students, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri),...

What opens Werner Herzog’s Ghost Elephants, even before we hear the German filmmaker’s distinctive cadence, is the National Geographic logo. While production credits are far from noteworthy in most cases, this one may stand out to the viewer by implying...

Traveling in a foreign land can be disorienting. Established routines lose their meaning. Unfamiliar sights, sounds, smells may trigger old memories or brand-new desires. Premiering in the Orizzonti sidebar of the 82nd Venice Film Festival, Catalan filmmaker Jaume Claret Muxart’s...

Six years since The Dead Don’t Die (long enough for that film to now be underrated), Jim Jarmusch is back with Father Mother Sister Brother, which finds him returning to the episodic structure of Night on Earth and Coffee and...

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. Emergent City (Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg) Full transparency: I’ve been to Sunset...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings. Museum of Modern ArtA series on New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina includes Déjà Vu on 35mm; the Michael Caine retrospective continues. Film at Lincoln CenterDouble-feature pairings of M. Night Shyamalan...

After dabbling in dystopian fantasy (The Lobster) and period comedy (The Favourite), shocking us along the way with original creations (Dogtooth) and fanciful adaptations (Poor Things) alike, Yorgos Lanthimos has proven time and again that there’s not a single uncreative...

Six years since his last narrative feature Bacurau (we might call 2023’s Pictures of Ghosts a notable interlude) Kleber Mendonça Filho made a splashy return with The Secret Agent, which––more than its rave reviews––earned an ultra-rare two prizes at this...