The Film Stage

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...

Sofia Coppola, Marc Jacobs, and 30 years of friendship between them––this triad was promising enough for A24 to jump on the project and for the Venice Film Festival to host its world premiere (out of competition). Where else if not...

Making its world premiere this Tuesday as part of the 50th Toronto International Film Festival’s Discovery section, Karla Badillo’s directorial debut Oca tells a Buñuelian fable of faith, pilgrimage, and revelation. With the impressive cast of Natalia Solián (Huesera: The...

It’s not too grand a statement to say the environment you watch a film in will heavily impact how you feel about it. This was the case with Sacrifice, a supposed satire of the uber-rich and celebrity worship that, viewed...

How do you tell when you stop being good people pretending to be bad and realize you’re just bad people who can’t even trick themselves into thinking they’re anything but? Caroline (Samara Weaving) asks this aloud earlier than you might...