The Film Stage

When I think about a quintessential Isabelle Huppert film, I like to defer to a largely forgotten feature that will soon turn ten: Serge Bozon’s 2017 Mrs. Hyde. I say “quintessential” because Huppert has long excelled at playing beleaguered women...

Any film that earns you, personally, the greatest number of Oscars since Walt Disney is a tough act to follow, so one must admire Sean Baker’s lack of pretension in succeeding Anora with a tribute to one of the, let’s...

There’s a melancholy to Tobias Nölle and Loran Bonnardot’s Tristan Forever that is comforting. A lingering, existential question hangs over everything: where does one belong? In the film, a Parisian doctor (Bonnardot himself) decides to permanently move to the South...

It’s the last day of junior high for Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) and her best friend Callie (Chloe Coleman); the veil of adulthood has never felt as thin as it does on that late-June morning in the car, blasting Michelle...

The new film from Anthony Chen takes a minute to find its rhythm. For the first hour or so of its admittedly substantial runtime, I couldn’t help but wonder if an LLM, prompted to make the most normcore script imaginable,...

To belong to the diaspora is to inhabit a paradox: a state of in-betweenness, neither fully inside or outside one’s home and adoptive countries. Films trying to map that condition also tend to feel somewhat “suspended,” populated as they are...

Moulding cruel or nihilistic characters into darkly attractive protagonists requires a deceptively delicate touch. We’ve grown so used to seeing it done effortlessly that a movie like Rosebush Pruning can perhaps be some useful reminder of how difficult it is...

From its humble beginnings as a scrappy viral web series nearly two decades ago, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s Groundhog Day-esque mission of attempting to book a show at Toronto’s Rivoli Theatre has now, two TV seasons on, reached the...

Every so often Criterion upgrades a title so old it is, in effect, new again. Case in point: Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, first put on DVD around the time this year’s college graduates were born, is coming to 4K this...

After Jane Schoenbrun’s haunting, astounding second feature I Saw the TV Glow topped our list of the best films of 2024, we’ve been counting down the days for the release of their follow-up. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,...