The Film Stage

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...

While this year’s Sundance Film Festival continues through the weekend, including online viewing nationwide, the winners have been unveiled, with Beth de Araújo’s Josephine taking the top dramatic jury and audience prizes, Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman’s Nuisance Bear...

Carousel is a movie out of time. Working with Chris Pine and Jenny Slate, writer-director Rachel Lambert has constructed a delicate, patient, slice-of-life picture recalling Murphy’s Romance or Starting Over. That this even got made feels special. Pine plays Noah,...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings. Roxy CinemaTexasville, The Mirror Has Two Faces, and Short Cuts play on 35mm; Ghost in the Shell screens on Sunday. Paris TheaterPrints of Strange Days and Pretty Poison show on Saturday...

Welcome to The B-Side! Here we talk about movie stars! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between.  Today we celebrate Canadian greatness. We celebrate Rachel McAdams! Our B-Sides...