The Film Stage

Having enjoyed a conversation with him just last year, I was obviously glad to speak with Richard Linklater about Nouvelle Vague, his film concerning the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and, in effect, the story of modern cinema’s big bang....

Premiering at the renowned festival True/False, Ian Bell’s acclaimed archival documentary WTO/99 follows the clash between the then-emerging World Trade Organization (WTO) and the more than 40,000 people who took to the streets of Seattle in 1999 to protest the...

Coming off one of the best films of the decade with Pacifiction and one of the best documentaries of this year with Afternoons of Solitude, Albert Serra is already in post-production on his next feature, Out of This World. Led...

With his debut feature, Arco, Ugo Bienvenu puts a unique, thought-provoking twist on the solarpunk genre. He gives us a glimpse of the sort of sustainable utopia that one would expect from the genre: clean air, luscious gardens, thriving wildlife,...

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 Sundance coverage. Rebuilding opens in theaters on November 14. We can all feel lonely. Even if we’re constantly surrounded by people, we can find ourselves detached or isolated––lost in...

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 Cannes coverage. Sirat has a one-week qualifying run in NY/LA starting November 14 and opens in 2026. For the French-Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe, a competition berth in Cannes has...

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 Telluride coverage. Jay Kelly opens in theaters on November 14 and arrives on Netflix on December 5. Let’s start here: Billy Crudup is one of our truly great actors....

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 BFI London coverage. Left-Handed Girl opens in theaters on November 14 and arrives on Netflix on November 28. The neon-lit alleyways of Taipei’s night markets have never looked quite...

As music thumps across the desert landscape of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains and ravers give themselves over to the endless bass, whispers of World War III echo in the margins. In Sirāt, Oliver Laxe’s fourth feature, pinning down exactly what the...

In order to best explain Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg––a stoic, ethereal vision quest of a film notorious among anime and cult enthusiasts for resisting explanation, and one which more readily invites comparisons to Cocteau, Tarkovsky, and Jodorowsky than other anime––it...