The Film Stage

After directing six (!) new films between 2020 and 2024, Zhang Yimou took a bit of a breather last year, but he’s now back this month with a new spy thriller. The Chinese director’s latest feature Scare Out stars Jackson...

As the world continues fermenting its vile culture, the gang behind The State and Wet Hot American Summer is back to save you from the merciless onslaught of bad news. At least for 90 minutes. The dynamic duo of director...

Finding poetic beauty in the quotidian, Walter Thompson-Hernández’s If I Go Will They Miss Me centers on coming of age in housing projects of southern Los Angeles. It’s a way of life often depicted with a grittiness that favors do-or-die...

A brisk docu-thriller that could do more with the richness of the players it chronicles, Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s Hanging by a Wire is not without thrills and human drama. Yet it seems focused more on a death-defying rescue than on...

Taking a genre familiar to Sundance audiences and creating something distinct, if not entirely original, Ramzi Bashour’s road-trip drama Hot Water finds subtle humor in two characters who feel entirely disconnected from each other despite the home and DNA they share. Layal...

Winner of the the Best Directing Award at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), as well as a selection at Hot Docs and more, French filmmaker Auberi Edler’s An American Pastoral goes deep inside the Pennsylvanian community of Elizabethtown to...

Among Sundance’s great pleasures is the experience of a film steadily building buzz to the point where it becomes the talk of the fest. Seats become scarce and a unique electricity imbues a charge to those screenings. Just as trying...

It’s a tall tale out of a Borges story, the wildest conspiracy theory you’ve never heard. In the 1960s, Italian Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti claimed to have invented a machine that allowed one to see and photograph the past. A...

A filmmaker attempting a career reset following an ill-received feature of larger scope often offers a fascinating study in artistic rejuvenation, be it David Lynch’s Blue Velvet or M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit. Following his lovely debut Columbus and strange,...

Certain warning signs might signal a film’s poor quality: calendar release date, lack of promotional materials, a lack of press screenings, late embargoes, a late premiere in a festival. A critic’s duty is to push these aside in the sincere...