The Film Stage

“The idea of the young [Marcel] Pagnol visiting the older Pagnol is nowhere to be found in his books,” director Sylvain Chomet tells me when it comes to A Magificent Life, his first film in fifteen years, a wistful animated...

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 Cannes coverage. The film opens in theaters on March 27. Tel Aviv native, defector, and auteur Nadav Lapid opens his fifth feature in a catastrophic state of carouse. A...

Museum of the Moving Image has unveiled its lineup for the 15th edition of First Look, the Museum’s festival of new and innovative international cinema, taking place April 23–May 3, 2026. Opening with James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s The Misconceived and...

Chalk up another sure-fire Cannes Film Festival debut. Sheep in the Box, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first feature of 2026 (preceding his adaptation of Look Back), has been set for a May 29 release in Japan, priming it for a world premiere...

Medieval life happened so long ago that our natural inclination is to view it from an alien remove and marvel at how someone actually lived like that. This is silly, of course: human nature stays fairly consistent throughout history, as...

One of the finest-curated festivals in America kicks off next month. The third edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies, co-presented by Kino Film Collection and Mezzanine, will take place April 9–12 and feature acclaimed films such as Blue Heron, Maddie’s Secret,...

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 Cannes coverage. The film opens in theaters on March 27. It’s common for a successful artist to be asked about advice they’d give their younger self; one film from...

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 Cannes coverage. The film opens in theaters on March 27. Julia Ducournau has turned 180 degrees since Titane, the gritty and bizarre thriller that Spike Lee’s Cannes jury awarded...

Unless you’re considering his perfect parodies in Clouds of Sils Maria and 2022’s Irma Vep, the words “Olivier Assayas” and “franchise cinema” don’t quite gel. If he were to make a late-in-life pivot, however, one could hardly ask for better...

Speaking with Christian Petzold last fall, the German auteur told us he was developing two films: one being a crime story for German TV, which would be his fourth installment of Polizeiruf 110, and another about “political-left witches who are...