The Film Stage

Next year marks two anniversaries: the (more or less) 130th of cinema and 50th of Saturday Night Live. Perhaps, thus, some fitting convergence that no idea in the history of cinema has been less-compelling than Jason Reitman doing a one-two...

A major note about this year’s New York Film Festival line-up: 19 of 34 directors have never been featured in the Main Slate. Debuting at Locarno before stopping stateside is Transamazonia, Pia Marais’ first feature since 2013’s Layla Fourie, which...

Rather than sit through interminable, months-long screenwriting courses charging fees so substantial they require a literal loan, there’s unique opportunity to develop skills and practice at a reasonable price. It’s a pleasure to announce I’m co-teaching a Zoom-based screenwriting workshop...

Long one of our favorite undistributed films of 2023, Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka has been acquired by Film Movement for a September 20 release. Ahead of this, we have a U.S. trailer that does well to capture the three-headed monster that...

One of the most entertaining films to premiere at Sundance earlier this year, Steven Soderbergh’s formally inventive ghost tale Presence has now reappeared. Ahead of a stop at the Toronto International Film Festival, NEON has now announced a January 17,...

The best directorial debut of the year, India Donaldson’s Good One, is a carefully-observed portrait of both womanhood and fatherhood, capturing the 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias, in a revelatory breakthrough performance) who embarks on a camping trip in the Catskills...

Shatara Michelle Ford’s sophomore feature Dreams in Nightmares is a Black road trip film with a big heart, full of warmth, healing, and beauty. With their debut film Test Pattern, Ford announced themselves as an essential new voice in Black...

After quite a long wait, the latest film from Blue Ruin and Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier is finally arriving in less than a month. Rebel Ridge, set to premiere on Netflix on September 6, stars Aaron Pierre, Don Johnson,...

As the war in Ukraine rages on, we’ve received a handful of essential cinematic dispatches capturing a country fighting back from unprovoked terror. The latest to arrive is Rule of the Two Walls, coming from Ukrainian-American director David Gutnik and...

Our latest review of new and recent books about (or connected to) cinema includes an extraordinary look at transness in film; memoirs from Griffin Dunne, Jon Chu, and Susan Seidelman; and several new books on music, highlighted by the latest...