The Film Stage

Few filmmakers with just two features under their belt can amass the passionate, cinephilic following of Bi Gan. His blend of surrealist storytelling, ultra-realist aesthetics, and a trippy play with time transforms rural China into a place of hypnotic beauty....

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here. The Black Sea (Crystal Moselle and Derrick B. Harden) For most of its runtime,...

Over a delicately structured, Mike Mills-ian montage of Nora Berg’s (Renate Reinsve) personal heritage––30-odd years of an Oslo native’s existence relayed in a sparse collection of seminal moments, feelings, and thoughts, then layered into the lives and characteristics of those...

It’s strange to hear backwood Appalachian fiddle folk in a French theater at the hand of a South African director portraying the queer, song-collecting lives of two American men who are madly, delicately in love and played by British stars....

If you were handed over the man who destroyed your life and those of countless others––a psychopath who tortured, raped, and murdered in the name of a tyrannical system––what would you do? Would you exact revenge or do the impossible––forgive...

I could name few living filmmakers better equipped for the Western than Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. The duo behind The Tale of King Crab––a film I revere like a sacred relic––have created their own niche in contemporary...

It came as quite the surprise that acclaimed director Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film, led by Jodie Foster and an all-star French cast, did not make Cannes competition. If it turns out A Private Life might indeed be too slight for...

Spike Lee’s joints are known for their sweeping coverage of New York City, in particular Brooklyn, and even more specifically Bed-Stuy––hardly ever the luxurious, Gotham-tinged, cobble-stoned streets of Dumbo. Outside a short doc made for the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce...

Continuing in the low-key register of her Golden Bear winner Alcarràs, Carla Simón returns with Romería, another tale of intergenerational dissonance. A film about the stories families choose to tell and the ones they bury deep inside, it unfurls on...

Julia Ducournau has turned 180 degrees since Titane, the gritty and bizarre thriller that Spike Lee’s Cannes jury awarded the Palme d’Or in 2021. There’s no doubt that all eyes are on her newest, Alpha, in a way they weren’t...