The Film Stage

I entered Asphalt City at last year’s EnergaCAMERIMAGE festival with nothing but morbid curiosity. Having engendered some rank responses from its Cannes premiere and not secured any known U.S. distributor, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s film had the right kind of bad-object energy...

The kind of movie made to stumble upon surfing cable at 2 am in a half-awake, half-intoxicated stupor, Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls aims for a lower artistic bar than anything the director (and certainly his brother) has previously approached, which...

The best bit of dialogue from any iteration of Dune was not written by Frank Herbert, but it so perfectly distilled the absurd wonder of his magnum opus that you’d be forgiven for assuming otherwise. “The sleeper has awakened” is...

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s penultimate film Nostalghia (1983), which he co-wrote with Michelangelo Antonioni’s longtime collaborator Tonino Guerra, Russian writer Andrei (Oleg Ivanovič Jankovskij) travels to Italy in order to research the life of composer Pavel Sosnovsky, along with his interpreter...

One of the most singular viewing (and listening) experiences of the year, the documentary The Tuba Thieves explores what it means to listen and how sound––particularly the absence of it––figures into everyday life. A fascinating counterpart to a fellow recent...

One of the long-awaited crown jewels of silent cinemas will be seen in its full glory soon. For nearly two decades work has been underway to restore Abel Gance’s 1927 epic Napoleon to as close as possible to its “Apollo...

If you haven’t been following him on Twitter, David Krumholtz has been one of the very few reasons to stay up to date on the happenings of that godforsaken site, sharing gloriously told tales of his time in Hollywood. The...

One of the most promising American indies of the year, Ryan Martin Brown’s Free Time brings together Colin Burgess, Rajat Suresh, Holmes, James Webb, Eric Yates, Jessie Pinnick, and Rebecca Bulnes for a story about a man rethinking his life’s...

Two things can be true at once. The old debate over whether Hong Sangsoo’s cinema is overly earnest or self-aware was always a bit reductive––when the most light-hearted of the director’s films transcend, it is usually a result of both....

Like a chimera of any intelligent person’s least-favorite storytelling models, we are (in the sense of a diagnosis) finally seeing the cinematic universe intersect with musical biopics. And where to start but the very biggest? Today brings the rather momentous...