The Film Stage

With an evocative opening-credits sequence as the camera swirls through a virtual landscape of neon signs and lights, one might think they are witnessing the beginning of the next Gaspar Noé film. Thankfully what follows in Flora Lau’s second feature...

Evoking Gordon Park’s black-and-white photographs of the New Deal Era, cinematographer Brittany Shyne’s powerful debut feature Seeds offers a portrait of a disappearing way of life for Black farmers in the American South. Its casual approach mostly reflects rhythms of...

Early one morning, a single father and widower (John Magaro)––credited as Dad––wakes up his perceptive nine-year-old Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and mischievous six-year-old Charlie (Wyatt Solis) and asks them to pack a suitcase as quickly as they can. Everyone is...

There is an unbridled honesty to André Is an Idiot that is admirable, even if all of it doesn’t really work. It’s a simple, stark subject for a documentary: accomplished advertising creative André Ricciardi neglected to get a colonoscopy at...

Twinless starts like a prototypical Sundance movie––grim and serious, plus unexpected levity. That’s the general formula for a festival that might as well have manufactured the term “dramedy.” In this case there’s an offscreen car accident and quick cut to a...

Early in Michael Shanks’ directorial debut Together, Millie (Alison Brie) warns her boyfriend Tim (Dave Franco) that if they don’t “split up” now, it’s only going to be harder later. She didn’t know how right she was about that. After...

With Sundance wrapped up, much of February’s attention toward the world of cinema will be on Berlinale. This month certainly isn’t stacked for new releases, but there’s a handful of gems and highlights worth having on your radar. 11. Bring...

Celebrating and condensing centuries of Black history that would take more than a few lifetimes for any scholar to thoroughly ascertain in totality, Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions eschews dryly academy ethnographic study to deliver a kaleidoscopic, vigorous, engrossing...

Sensitive and nuanced, Katarina Zhu’s directorial debut Bunnylovr is a compelling character study that never quite makes sense of the messy life of personal assistant by day / cam girl by night Becca (Zhu). Perhaps that is the point, although...

After his long-awaited return with Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg returned last year to the festival circuit with The Shrouds, a darkly funny conspiracy thriller led by Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, and newly minted Oscar nominee Guy Pearce. Picked...