The Film Stage

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2024 Sundance Film Festival coverage. Freaky Tales opens in theaters on April 4 from Lionsgate. Before the early-morning Sundance premiere of Freaky Tales, one of the festival’s programmers introduced the movie...

In honor of the legendary Val Kilmer, who has passed away at the age of 65, we’re sharing The B-Side’s episode from 2022 discussing his career and most overlooked films. See the original description below. Today, we discuss one of...

Terrence Malick’s status as a moving target––more accurately, a target who rushes towards us while seen through a wide-angled lens––makes it easy to lose track of odds and ends. Thus I sometimes forget our report from August 2023, working from...

Expanding her scope (and color palette) after her dryly hilarious debut El Planeta, Amalia Ulman is back with Magic Farm. Starring Chloë Sevigny, Simon Rex, Alex Wolff, and Joe Apollonio, the Sundance premiere follows a film crew who travels to Argentina to...

Henry Fonda for President envisions American history through the dual lives of Henry Fonda: the movie star and the real man behind him. While it’s the debut film from 61-year-old director Alexander Horwath, following his many years as a critic and...

Michael Shannon set himself up with quite a daunting challenge for his directorial debut: how can one capture oppressively bleak, soul-consuming feelings of guilt while not having the viewer feel trapped in a flat register of misery porn? Thanks to...

In towards which nobody could have anything but the most equitable reactions, well, the headline says it all, much as I find the development difficult to 100% conceptualize or, given today’s date, plainly believe. Seemingly salvaging The Movie Critic (or...

While our sprawling summer movie preview will arrive by the end of the month, we’ll first take a comprehensive look at the April releases to have on your radar. Featuring festival favorites from as far back as early last year...

The Academy Awards likely aren’t that important in the grand scheme of film history, but legendary actor Henry Fonda winning his first competitive Oscar merely five months before dying is perhaps one of those things that makes you think on...

Conan O’Brien can be forgiven for quipping “Over to you, Estonia” after Flow won Latvia its first Oscar last month. The concept of a shared Baltic Cinema is still a relatively obscure one: “We have this complicated identity, culturally,” Laurynas...