The Film Stage

If there is a filmmaker whose work can be described as “elemental cinema,” that’s Lucile Hadžihalilović. It’s easy to chronicle her 2015 film Evolution as fluvial for its many water (and underwater) scenes, but also how its rhythmic flow steers...

Sam Riley stars as Tom, a washed-up tennis-pro-turned-coach at a luxury island hotel on the Canary Islands, in Islands, the English-language debut of A Coffee in Berlin director Jan-Ole Gerster. He is the protagonist, but we know little about a...

With just two films to her name (in addition to co-producing the Golden Bear-winning Black Coal, Thin Ice), Vivian Qu has become one of China’s most prominent female filmmakers. Her long-awaited follow-up to the excellent Angels Wear White (which premiered...

With just two films to her name (in addition to co-producing the Golden Bear-winning Black Coal, Thin Ice), Vivian Qu has become one of China’s most prominent female filmmakers. Her long-awaited follow-up to the excellent Angels Wear White (which premiered...

Few things loosen the grip of winter like a sun-kissed film. Add listless days and young love to the narrative and you might even forget the icy chill outside. Snow was gently falling around the Zoo Palast before an early...

Two decades ago, stop-motion animator Adam Elliot burst onto the scene with his wonderful short Harvie Krumpet. Following a man cursed with lifelong bad luck, it earned him an Oscar and introduced the world at large to Elliot’s wicked sense...

French director Léonor Serraille’s third feature Ari is the portrait of an über-sensitive young man who ponders his place in the world while looking up people from his past to hold conversations that were never had. If this sounds like...

Some images have become metonymic by nature, reflecting the political problems of today with little to no context needed. Such a shot opens Michel Franco’s newest offering, Dreams, and it is one of a huge truck abandoned next to a...

Is Mark Ruffalo giving a Trump impression? It’s early into Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 when the actor struts into the frame in a velvety blazer, wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) in tow, gloating as a crowd stands and claps like...

A mother-daughter relationship is rarely a love story, at least not in any of the ways art has dramatized it thus far. Sure, a mother loves her daughter deeply (and vice-versa), but it is a sentiment defined by ambivalence and...