The Film Stage

Initially considered the heir to Robert Bresson, Bruno Dumont shocked audiences in 2014 with the heel-turn of his Twin Peaks-inspired miniseries P’tit Quinquin, which (were it not television) would certainly earn the label of An Extremely Goofy Movie. His switch...

I wish there were an exact subgenre for Robina Rose’s Nightshift so I could see every single one of its kin. The British feature––recalling the austere melancholy of Chantal Akerman or films of its cinematographer, Jon Jost––has spent 40-plus years...

Before jumping directly into the action, Paul W.S. Anderson’s In the Lost Lands opens with a framing device we’ll return to only at film’s end. The George R. R. Martin adaptation otherwise gives no context whatsoever, and when the plot...

After showcasing work from the likes of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Kelly Reichardt, Pedro Almodóvar, Souleymane Cissé, Jia Zhangke, Spike Lee, Lynne Ramsay, Michael Haneke, Wong Kar-wai, Agnieszka Holland, Denis Villeneuve, Luca Guadagnino, and more, New Directors/New Films is back...

“Focus the text” commands a translation app pop-up at the mid-point of Matías Piñeiro’s new experimental essay film You Burn Me. It’s a mantra that the Argentinian filmmaker has taken to heart. Using Sea Foam, a chapter from Cesare Pavese’s...

After making a splash with his uncompromising incest drama Saint-Narcisse, underground Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce returned to Berlinale last year with The Visitor, his explicit take on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema. Ahead of a release from Circle Collective starting this...

Named one of the 10 best films of Cahiers du Cinéma back in 2023, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s crime thriller The Temple Woods Gang is finally getting a proper U.S. release later this year from Several Futures. However, New York City audiences...

Three decades on from Brian De Palma’s gleefully unhinged psychological thriller Raising Cain, John Lithgow has once again found a cinematic role to showcase his panache for exuding deranged evil. New Zealand director James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen,...

Wherever you call home, it’s hard to be invested in cinephile culture without a mind towards its health. It was hardly some casual choice when Sean Baker took time during an Oscar-acceptance speech to plea for greater attendance––with each year...

After decades of celebrated performances in Italian cinema and television, Paola Cortellesi made her directorial debut with There’s Still Tomorrow, a 1940s-set post-war drama that she also co-wrote and leads. Following the matriarch of a working-class family navigating a toxic...