The Film Stage

We can admire those who (brilliantly) craft entire feature films on iPhones, but the choice to shoot a three-hour feature with a Sony Ericsson––a device which ceased manufacturing in 2011––reaches an altogether different level of formal bravery. Alexandre Koberidze will...

Boys Go to Jupiter, an animated feature directed and written by Pittsburgh-based 3D artist Julian Glander, is truly a product of its time. And that time is now. As the press notes mention: “[The film] was self-produced and animated entirely...

Amy Berg’s It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is an impressive archival document as well as a celebration of the life of a tortured artist. And while the term “tortured artist” is certainly overused, it feels especially apt when writing about Buckley. Here was a...

Reteaming with Netflix after his ambitious misstep White Noise, Noah Baumbach is getting introspective. Jay Kelly stars George Clooney and Adam Sandler as a movie star and his manager, respectively, as they reflect on life and their careers on a...

For as long as we’ve known about Weapons, writer-director Zach Cregger’s hotly anticipated follow-up to his 2022 blackly comic splatter sensation Barbarian, we have heard endlessly that it’s the supernatural horror genre’s epic equivalent to Magnolia––not exactly the most marketable...

Ahead of the 63rd New York Film Festival kicking off next month, taking place September 26 through October 13, the Main Slate has now been unveiled, featuring 34 of the most acclaimed and anticipated films of the year. Highlights include...

In the fifteen interminably long years since James L. Brooks’ last directorial feature, the kind of adult-focused, warm dramas with recognizably emphatic characters that have defined his career have sadly fallen out of fashion. After staying busy helping emerging filmmakers...

Welcome to The B-Side, a podcast from The Film Stage! Here we talk about movie stars! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between. From box office fiascos to...

Spike Lee’s first narrative feature in five years is Highest 2 Lowest, his reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low that marks a reteam with Denzel Washington after Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game, and Inside Man. Also starring Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera,...

David Lynch passed a little more than six months ago, and the world of cinema is still mourning. (Honestly, that may never end.) Let’s start with a book devoted to two of the most important elements of any Lynch creation—music...