The Film Stage

While certainly best-known for Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica’s vast, varied body of work is worth diving into. This June, those in NYC can experience quite a taste of it with four films by the director at Film at Lincoln...

The Cannes crush can be so unforgiving. This year’s case in point: Misericordia has premiered to relatively little notice despite being the latest by the great Alain Guiraudie. This is no doubt owed to placing out of competition and into...

MUBI has unveiled next month’s streaming lineup, featuring recent releases such as Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, Tynan DeLong’s Dad & Step-Dad, and Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying. Additional highlights include Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Passion, Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, Alex Thompson’s Saint...

At a wake for the murder of Russian journalist and activist Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead in 2006 in the elevator of her apartment block in Moscow, French writer Emmanuel Carrère spotted a familiar silhouette. Though born Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko, by...

Do you smell what The Rock is cooking? For the last decade-plus (at least post-Pain & Gain), Dwayne Johnson has been serving up four-quadrant blockbuster slop. Thankfully, he seems to be turning a new direction for The Smashing Machine, which...

When news broke last year of John Hillcoat adapting Blood Meridian, I had expressed some hope for similar treatment bestowed upon Cormac McCarthy’s final novels The Passenger and Stella Maris. This desire was almost entirely quixotic; his swan song is...

Jia Zhangke’s is often a cinema of déjà vu: “We’re again in the northern Chinese city of Datong,” Giovanni Marchini Camia wrote for Sight and Sound back in 2019, “it’s again the start of the new millennium, Qiao is again...

Scale, sweep, or schadenfreude; whatever you might be seeking in the films of Kevin Costner, you tend to walk away with the vistas. Think of the golden plains and stampeding buffalo of his directorial debut Dances with Wolves; or the...

Oh, to be one of the chosen. I guarantee this thought washes over every single person attending the Cannes Film Festival, at least at some point. It is a realization laden with ambivalence, as both an exclamation and a lament;...