The Film Stage

The 75th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival opens today and, following the rather unceremonious end of its previous two directors’ respective tenure, all eyes are on new Berlinale head Tricia Tuttle and whether she can help the wintry...

Essentially a lost film, legendary director Charles Burnett’s 1999 feature The Annihilation of Fish mostly lived on the festival circuit (and in bootlegs) for a quarter-century until a recent miraculous restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The...

While many cinephilic pleasures can be derived from diving into underseen gems from many decades ago, it’s extremely rare to find a film shot before many of our lifetimes and only resurrected for completion recently. Such is the case for...

Our first roundup of 2025 features some major releases; given the state of things, we should be very thankful for that. Note that our next column will include a lengthy list of new and recent novels and short fiction (one...

A yearly highlight of New York programming (and North American options at large), the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look returns on March 12 with an opening-night, US-premiere screening of Durga Chew Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse, closes March 16 with...

Following up his intense second feature Beanpole, we’ve been waiting to see if Kantemir Balagov’s follow-up would finally come to fruition. After years of development, things are finally moving forward with his English-language debut Butterfly Jam as two stars have...

Following up her two consecutive features Sharp Stick and Catherine Called Birdy, Lena Dunham jumped into the 10-episode Netflix rom-com Too Much, which will hopefully get a release this year. Along with signing a first-look deal with Netflix for future...

Learning about Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 16-month occupation of Fiume, a tale vividly retold in Igor Bezinović’s new, Tiger Award-winning documentary Fiume o Morte!, I spared a thought for Yukio Mishima. D’Annunzio’s life didn’t end so theatrically, but the two men––celebrated writers...

Remember Vice News? It was like CNN with neck tattoos and no 401K. The now-defunct outlet sent its platoon of journalists (who could have moonlighted as American Apparel models) all over the globe to bring you the stories traditional media...

You ever tie someone up and then leave them there? Me either. But it sure makes an interesting inciting incident for a movie. Something much more relatable is the romantic getaway––an important milestone in any new relationship. All that unadulterated time...