The Film Stage

Let’s eschew the type of slow-burning, big reveal that Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc excels at in the Knives Out series, and cut to the chase: Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is another satisfying, impossible-to-predict yarn...

David Mackenzie gets the opening credits out of the way as soon as we sit down to watch his latest film Fuze. A majority of the 98 minutes which follow are akin to a feature-length cold open surging at breakneck...

The new documentary With Hasan in Gaza––a poignant, meditative portrait of a city now fighting for its life––works as both a travelogue and time machine. In 2001, the filmmaker Kamal Aljafari journeyed to Palestine in the hopes of finding Adder...

Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi is best known for her 2017 Golden Bear-winning film On Body and Soul, where an unlikely pair of characters met in a dream and, as deer, fell in love. This remarkably tender Berlinale winner is, in...

Based on a real-life conversation shared by co-director Meriem Bennani and her own mother, Bouchra (co-directed with Orian Barki and co-written by them and Ayla Mrabet) opens with a phone call. Aicha (Yto Barrada) is checking in on her daughter...

You almost believe Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine) wants the village perspective when asking his chauffeur Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya) to explain the Palestinian experience outside the city to a collection of landowners at his table. He’s barely able to get the...

In 1921, three years since the end of WWI, a train departed the small town of Aquileia in northeastern Italy. Draped in flags and wreathes, it carried the coffin of an unidentified soldier to his final resting place in Rome....

The Bend in the River, director Robb Moss’ third installment in his running chronicle of his friends’ lives (following The Same River Twice in 2003 and Riverdogs in the late ’70s ), is a gentle, effective documentary that can often...

Gus Van Sant returns with Dead Man’s Wire, a movie shot in the same late-70s hues as Kelly Reichardt’s recent gem The Mastermind, and likewise concerned with unlawful men and the paradox of a decent criminal. Van Sant’s movie, however,...

Since the early 2000s, the fiercely independent Argentine filmmaking collective El Pampero Cine has built a sui generis filmography by shirking conventions. A catalogue that includes Mariano Llinás’ 13.5-hour La Flor and Laura Citarella’s 4.5-hour Trenque Lauquen doesn’t exactly make...