The Film Stage

I can’t say it was difficult finding nine posters to talk about this month––most new April releases were given the bad Photoshop treatment. Some, like Cash Out, scream DTV. Some, like Arcadian, try their best to at least make the...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here. Astrakan (David Depesseville) Astrakhan fur is unique: dark, beautiful, and stripped exclusively from newborn...

Welcome to The B-Side, from The Film Stage. Here we talk about movie directors! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between. Today we talk to an independent film...

“We are so excited to have you here and are blown away this is even happening,” I signed off on a hasty call to Coop Vidéo de Montréal, setting up an interview with Robert Morin, a French-Canadian director who had...

Every time I’ve seen The Beast there comes some point where I think Bertrand Bonello is the world’s greatest under-60 filmmaker. Not quite a new stance for me (declaring Saint Laurent the best movie of the 2010s was a lonely...

In Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, the Italian writer-director’s fourth narrative feature film, the past melds with the present. Art is something to be dug up, to be discovered, regardless of its origins. A circus troupe does the digging, led by...

After a year-and-a-half of copyright drama, The People’s Joker is finally here. The daring mixture of both tones and form will be sure to impress anyone, even those without a lick of investment in the DC subject matter it is...

The nearly year-long span from discovering Janet Planet‘s existence to seeing a single frame was fraught with worry. What if the extraordinarily talented Annie Baker fumbled her transition into filmmaking? Nothing catastrophic, surely––no sane person’s faulting Michael Jordan for his...

Though likely shot before he gave literally the one Academy Awards speech worth anything on this godforsaken earth, we can submit his new Prada ad starring Scarlett Johansson as evidence that Jonathan Glazer––whatever that weird, genocide-denying Google Doc literally anyone...

Complementing recent work with the Roxy Cinema and BAM, I’ve begun a monthly screening series at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research. It’s called Amnesiascope and somewhat unique: a “blindfold” program wherein I pick the (rare, out-of-print) film and you...