The Film Stage

The Friend Directors Scott McGehee & David Siegel on Finding the Perfect Dog, Bill Murray’s Notes, and Avoiding Cliches
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Writer-director duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel have been working together for 30 years, since their debut thrilled Suture in 1994. Since then, they’ve only made seven films, with their latest being The Friend, a comedy-drama adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s...
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“Nobody Can See It In Georgia”: April Director Dea Kulumbegashvili on State Suppression and Luca Guadagnino’s Protection
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With only two feature films, Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili has collected some of the highest accolades in the film world. Her astonishing debut Beginning received a Cannes label at the festival’s canceled pandemic edition and won four of the seven...
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Jude Law Hunts Down White Supremacists in First Trailer for Justin Kurzel’s The Order
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Working at quite a steady clip, Justin Kurzel followed up True History of the Kelly Gang and Nitram with The Order, which premiered this fall at Venice Film Festival. Starring Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett, Alison Oliver,...
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BFI London Review: All of You Offers a Grown-Up Sci-Fi Romance
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Many films have dared to ask if a man and a woman can ever just be friends, but very few have managed to answer in the affirmative. For most of its first half, All of You appeared destined to wind...
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U.S. Trailer for Payal Kapadia’s Dazzling Cannes Winner All We Imagine as Light
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One of the most acclaimed films of the year, Payal Kapadia’s dazzling Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize winner All We Imagine as Light is now finally rolling out stateside. After stops at Telluride, TIFF, and NYFF, Sideshow and Janus Films...
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BFI London Review: Blitz Is an Unabashedly Hopeful, Mainstream Work from Steve McQueen
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Steve McQueen has long been upfront about his desire to make a musical; before Widows underwhelmed at the box office, it appeared likely that a passion project within that genre would be his next film. With each subsequent effort, it...
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“Shut Up, Shut Up, Listen”: Julia Loktev on My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow
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For a certain kind of cinephile (e.g. me) more than a decade’s been spent wondering about Julia Loktev. The brilliant director behind Day Night Day Night and The Loneliest Planet has been largely off-the-grid since the latter’s release in 2011,...
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NYFF Review: The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is a Bold Rethinking of Black Surrealism 
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The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, the feature debut from artist and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, aims to foreground its primary literary material and historical context, but instead directs more attention to its oneiric touches and environmental phenomena––the “wind in the trees,”...
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Amnesiascope and Rohmer Fits Present A Tale of Autumn on October 13 and 22
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Rohmer Summer has fed into Rohmer Fall: following sold-out screenings of The Green Ray and a shorts program, my screening series Amnesiascope has partnered again with Instagram auteur Rohmer Fits for two special screenings of Éric Rohmer’s 1998 triumph A...
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First Teaser for Sylvain Chomet’s First Film in 15 Years, The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol
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While his work was recently seen worldwide (or least screened worldwide, even if the theaters were empty) with crafting the opening animated sequence of Joker: Folie à Deux, Sylvain Chomet is also hard at work on his next feature. Set...
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