The Film Stage

This being such a busy year for premieres, one is liable to forget the seven-months-gone debut of The Ice Tower. We nevertheless found it one of 2025’s more notable offerings, which makes all the more appreciated Yellow Veil Pictures giving...

Films about films will earn a reflexive grown from the cynical; a film about one of the 15-or-so most-influential films ever––while, for good measure, serving as an origin story for the titanic movement it effectively began, with actors dressing up...

Eight years since Zama and more than two since she shared details, Lucrecia Martel has returned with her first feature-length documentary, Landmarks (Nuestra Tierra in its native tongue). The look at the murder of indigenous Argentine activist Javier Chocobar has...

With less than three weeks until the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, the director has finally unveiled his highly anticipated epic ahead of the official Los Angeles premiere tonight. Last night at the DGA theater in...

Steven Soderbergh will not stop, and we should be thankful for that. His second film of 2025, The Christophers, is easily the year’s least essential, yet it has plenty to say about Soderbergh, his oeuvre, and where he finds himself...

After landing on our radar with his remarkable, formally fascinating Atlantis, Ukrainian director Valentyn Vasyanovych has returned with To the Victory!, which world premiered in the Platform section at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival yesterday. Imagining the future of...

There’s no telling whether Park Chan-wook is a fan of the Sex Pistols. But during his latest film, No Other Choice, I found myself pondering the line John Lydon memorably uttered during the band’s disastrous final performance in 1978: “Ever...

Derek Cianfrance’s place in the current American cinema landscape might be somewhat minuscule, but it’s still one worth acknowledging. His small filmography of only four features and one HBO miniseries displays remarkable tonal and stylistic consistency: post-Cassavetes grit cranked so...

There is a moment early in Hikari’s Rental Family that promises a much darker, more unsettling film. Brendan Fraser, a likable Oscar winner for Darren Aronofsky’s quite unlikable The Whale, plays a struggling actor in Tokyo named Philip. He is...

“Aren’t we past this?” That’s the thought that ran through this writer’s head during Christy, the boxing biopic designed as an official Oscar vehicle for Sydney Sweeney. Both the distributor and actress seem to have similarly malignant aims for the...