The Film Stage

When it was announced Arnaud Desplechin’s next feature Spectateurs! (titled the less-appealing Filmlovers! in English) would be a) a docu-fiction hybrid; b) about cinema and, in particular moviegoing; c) a continuation of the Paul Dedalus saga that’s starred Mathieu Amalric...

In Universal Language, a man makes a journey to his childhood home and meets the family now living there––these are at least the broad strokes. The director is Matthew Rankin, a Canadian filmmaker whose work usually requires less-basic terms. In...

In The Surfer, an exploitation film set to pressure-cook, a mild-mannered man is pitted against a group who even Andrew Tate might find a touch extreme. It’s set in South Australia on fictional Luna Bay, the kind of place where...

Up to this point, Mikey Madison––the fearless, explosive 27-year-old lead of Sean Baker’s Anora––is best-known for her chilling turn as the deranged killer in the 2022 Scream reboot. Before that she was the shrieking Manson girl in the finale of...

It’s opportune timing for a 4K restoration of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, the only anime feature to debut in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The 20 years since that premiere have been kind to Mamoru Oshii’s film,...

Aside from Jean-Luc Godard’s last film, one of the shortest premieres at Cannes Film Festival that was among our most-anticipated is Leos Carax’s 40-minute cine-memoir It’s Not Me. While our review of the latest work from the Holy Motors and...

“We humans are capable of greatness,” reads the first line in Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s The Hyperboreans as the narrator’s voice beams from an old TV set. On the screen, a hypno wheel spins and spins; the voice speaks...

Welcome to a new episode of The Film Stage Show! Brian Roan and Robyn Bahr discuss Field of Dreams (now streaming on Prime Video) in a special Classic episode featuring guest Noah Gittell, author of the new book Baseball: The...

The tragic predicament of the Palestinians and what they’re now being subjected to begs to be analyzed and dissected, with various areas of dubious historical consensus put to new scrutiny; in Mahdi Fleifel’s fiction debut To a Land Unknown, we’re...

David Cronenberg’s films have often imagined a future where technology would find a way into our collective id. 55 years into the director’s incomparable career, might that future have finally caught up with him? In Cronenberg’s new film––the slick, scrambled...