The Film Stage

If Hollywood’s animation offerings have been fairly stale of late, look no further than the independent-filmmaking side for one of the year’s most inventive animations. Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki’s animation/live-action hybrid Bouchra is a debut feature that combines vulnerable...

One of the most pernicious tendencies in the way we talk about cinema is to reduce films to quantifiable objects—things that can be assessed in terms of how much or little goes on in them. It’s the kind of approach...

In Ben’Imana, the perpetrators of a genocide are being put on public trial, but it just as often feels like the families of their victims are being forced to plead their case. The first Rwandan film to premiere in Cannes’...

A (lonely) man meets a (beautiful) woman who would go on to change his life––a tale as old as time. Transformations, physical or psychological, are part and parcel of storytelling, even if the heteronormative reality of such an encounter can...

Criterion’s summer is more or less complete. As June and July prove fine months, August does not buck any trend: they’ve announced today a 4K release of Todd Haynes’ Safe (complete with audio commentary by Haynes, Julianne Moore, and producer...

James Gray had left the comfort zone of the native New York he chronicled over the first two decades of his career, sending Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, and Tom Holland into the Amazon jungle for The Lost City of Z...

A full decade since The Neon Demon—with mega-length streaming projects Too Old to Die Young and Copenhagen Cowboy perhaps comprising a separate, wholly worthwhile career—Nicolas Winding Refn has returned to feature filmmaking. From the first look, it seems little, thankfully,...

It’s never night in Hope Harbor. At least so long as we’re there. The eschatological events of writer-director Na Hong-Jin’s high-octane, highly anticipated Hope unfold over the course of one long, grueling, nonstop chase of a day for its rag-tag...

A pair of international cinema’s greatest directors have confirmed their next features. First up: while Jia Zhangke is at Cannes to premiere his new, 32-minute short Torino Shadow, he’s unveiled his next feature, following the culminating Caught by the Tides....

There’s a spot on the windswept island around which Dominga Sotomayor’s La Perra unfolds where gas bubbles up from the sea. A pipeline has burst by the shore, and fumes have gurgled out of it since time immemorial. It’s a...