The Film Stage

A Hong Sangsoo Berlinale premiere is no surprising development, but the first details on his 34th feature, The Day She Returns, are particularly exciting. Not least that the title would seem to directly signal perhaps his single greatest film, The...

What exactly is artificial intelligence? Where does it come from? And precisely how powerful is (or will) it become? Valerie Veatch’s documentary Ghost in the Machine digs into these answers and finds things both disturbing and unsurprising. This is a...

Following up Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and his Oscar-winning Drive My Car with Evil Does Not Exist, which was shot in secret, more info is coming together for Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s next feature, All of a Sudden. The French production,...

Even before his campaign for the removal of indigenous people from their land in the 1800s, Thomas Jefferson was pillaging burial grounds under the guise of scientific understanding. His actions predate those by countless archaeologists who followed suit: disturbing and...

A kaleidoscopic celebration of creativity and the boundaries of free speech, David Shadrack Smith’s Public Access revisits the birth of cable television, providing a complex oral history of its promises as a mirror for society and the first wave of...

Kicking off next week, the 2026 Berlinale will bring no shortage of new discoveries, and one on our radar is the feature debut from Saša Vajda. The lights, they fall—starring Mohammed Yassin Ben Majdouba, Flor Prieto Catemaxca, Mahira Hakberdieva, Safet...

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...