The Film Stage

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,...

We were just remarking a few weeks ago how it’s the summer of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, with the largest-ever U.S. retrospective of the British masters now underway and the Martin Scorsese-narrated documentary  The post Luca Guadagnino Says Queer...

Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples is among the most formally adventurous films ever made about a late-in-life Bat Mitzvah––scripted with more narrative and structural surprise than its basic bedrock would ever suggest, shot (by Sean Price Williams) and edited (courtesy...

The best Christmas present of the year, after his biggest project yet with The Northman, Robert Eggers jumped quickly into his long-developing passion project: a new take on F. W. Murnau’s 1922 German Expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu, itself inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. With...

Jesse Rudoy’s acclaimed documentary Dusty & Stones follows a continent-crossing journey story told through country music. The documentary, picked up by First Run Features for a summer theatrical released, intimately chronicles the remarkable ride of cousins Gazi “Dusty” Simelane and...

It’s nearly five years since we learned David Fincher and Robert Towne would partner on a Chinatown series concerning the early days of Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes. (One made, naturally, for Netflix.) The time since (Mank, The Killer) pointed towards...