The Film Stage

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings. Japan SocietyA six-film Nobuhiko Obayashi retrospective, featuring imported 35mm and 16mm prints, begins (watch our exclusive trailer debut). Anthology Film ArchivesWillem Dafoe: Wild at Heart features films by Ferrara, Lynch,...

Though once head-spinningly prolific, Tsui Hark hasn’t directed a solo feature since 2018’s Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings, the time between then and now seeing one short in the Septet omnibus and two co-helmed entries in China’s über-popular Battle...

In Videoheaven, Blockbuster––to take after Thom Andersen––plays itself. Now deep in a pop-cultural-scholarship phase inaugurated by his last feature Pavements, Alex Ross Perry has made a generous, absorbing three-hour essay film-cum-documentary on nothing else but video-rental stores, those fabled and...

After Bait and Enys Men proved to be a pair of the most tactile, distinctive films of the last few years, director Mark Jenkin is expanding scope for his latest. The Cornish director finished production in secret this past summer on his time-travel mystery...

It’s always thrilling when a horror film explores the power and possibility of sound. Much modern horror is too quiet, missing the opportunity to create an immersive soundscape that fully transports viewers into its world. Writer-director Bryn Chainey’s debut feature...

Kim A. Snyder’s The Librarians is a comprehensive documentary that maps well-funded, right-wing political groups’ nationwide mission to ban books and those standing up to this movement in the name of anti-censorship. And though there are expected touches throughout (onscreen...

Dabbling in narrative filmmaking in-between his many documentaries, it was recently announced Werner Herzog was in production on his first animated feature, The Twilight World, based on his 2021 novel of the same name. Now we have another narrative project to...

Turning 95 years old on New Year’s Day, Frederick Wiseman has a body of work that could be argued as the most important in cinema history. To view it in totality, he has captured every spectrum of human behavior in...

In the fictional country of Atropia, everything is played for real. Nestled into the southern California desert, the U.S. military-built training ground looks, acts, and even smells like an Iraqi city, populated by a plethora of actors pretending to be...

Like so many other actors sucked up by the Marvel machine, the extensive shooting and promotion commitments often mean a plethora of projects showing their more adventurous, praise-worthy acting talent never see the light of day. As Sebastian Stan begins...