The Film Stage

Kim A. Snyder’s The Librarians is a comprehensive documentary that maps well-funded, right-wing political groups’ nationwide mission to ban books and those standing up to this movement in the name of anti-censorship. And though there are expected touches throughout (onscreen...

Dabbling in narrative filmmaking in-between his many documentaries, it was recently announced Werner Herzog was in production on his first animated feature, The Twilight World, based on his 2021 novel of the same name. Now we have another narrative project to...

Turning 95 years old on New Year’s Day, Frederick Wiseman has a body of work that could be argued as the most important in cinema history. To view it in totality, he has captured every spectrum of human behavior in...

In the fictional country of Atropia, everything is played for real. Nestled into the southern California desert, the U.S. military-built training ground looks, acts, and even smells like an Iraqi city, populated by a plethora of actors pretending to be...

Like so many other actors sucked up by the Marvel machine, the extensive shooting and promotion commitments often mean a plethora of projects showing their more adventurous, praise-worthy acting talent never see the light of day. As Sebastian Stan begins...

After his revelatory coming-of-age film Genesis, Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage has expanded his canvas with Who by Fire, a lush, intimate, and psychologically riveting drama following two families on a secluded getaway in a remote cabin as they contend with...

A few years back, directors Lois Patiño and Matías Piñeiro joined forces for what was meant to be a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The resulting short, Sycorax, felt like the meeting of two kindred spirits. Piñeiro’s ability...

The degree of difficulty in making East of Wall must have been enormous: a small budget, a series of remote locations, a slew of non-actor performers, and the incredibly arduous task of working with horses. Written and directed by Kate...

Set years before George Michael’s arrest and inspired by the bathroom raids that provoked a moral panic in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1963, Carmen Emmi’s Syracuse-set thriller Plainclothes offers a unique twist on the coming-out genre. Cruising the food court and...

Offering a twist on the body-swap genre, Amanda Kramer’s Sundance Next entry By Design feels, at first glance, more suited to the stage or gallery than cinema. It’s a story about luxury, envy, and longing with a dry tone that...