The Film Stage

While thankfully the January 6 insurrection wasn’t successful in the intended coup of the United States government, the threats posed play out to another, far more disastrous conclusion with the new documentary War Game. Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber’s Sundance...

It was just yesterday we learned Robert Zemeckis was taking another ambitious formal gamble in his career with Here. His adaptation of Richard McGuire’s comic, which spans a single space from 500,957,406,073 BCE to the year 22,175 CE, was shot...

If knives weren’t already being sharpened for Ti West prior to MaXXXine––the third installment in his X series of exploitation throwbacks––they likely will be at the ready once discerning horror fans experience it. On the surface, this is West returning...

As we near the halfway point of the decade thus far, there’s still no better documentary to arrive than one that premiered in the first month of the 2020s. Garrett Bradley’s Oscar-nominated poetic masterpiece Time follows Sibil Fox Richardson, who had been...

Writing about Robert Zemeckis’ Here in our 2024 preview, we noted the potential between source material and director: “it adapts Richard McGuire’s comic spanning a single space from 500,957,406,073 BCE to the year 22,175 CE, and set (somewhat) closer to...

Angela Schanelec’s cinema is one of details. It has not always been that way, though, or at least not so apparently; her early films, formally rigorous, with shots lasting long past the point where people vacate the frame or where...

After breaking out with A Quiet Place, in which they created the story and scripted, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods had far less success with their dinosaur thriller 65, despite a committed Adam Driver performance. The duo are now back to...

Welcome to a new episode of The Film Stage Show! Brian Roan and Robyn Bahr are joined by Brendan Hodges to discuss Richard Linnklater’s Hit Man. Enter our giveaways, get access to our private Slack channel, and support new episodes...

The first thing you learn about Tinto Brass’ Caligula is that it’s shocking, disgusting, immoral. If you learn anything else it’s the specific description of the acts committed onscreen. Keep going and soon enough someone dismisses the film––less as shocking,...

It’s of course essential that the actor-auteur relationship has some bedrock of trust, and the last descriptor one could apply to Julianne Nicholson is “amateur.” Still, carrying the first feature by a playwright (brilliant or otherwise) is no small task,...