The Film Stage

Few recent films scratch an itch like MEGADOC. Whatever the cinematic value of Mike Figgis’ documentary––and accounting for cheap-looking title cards with obvious typos, low-energy music, maybe not enough done with interview subject George Lucas while cutting out the participating...

Nobel laureate Albert Camus is one of the most consequential thinkers and writers in the French language, having created absurdist characters and worlds that reflect a view on human existence which remains hauntingly unique. His debut novel The Stranger has...

Paul Thomas Anderson is taking another strike at Thomas Pynchon in One Battle After Another, a modern-day reworking of the reclusive author’s 1990 novel Vineland. And Pynchon himself is back in the news with a new novel, Shadow Ticket, out...

Comprising 48 titles from 28 countries, this year’s Short Cuts program at the Toronto International Film Festival doesn’t represent any sort of significant change from 2024 (48 shorts but from 23 countries, so a little more geographic representation this time)....

The Smashing Machine is a movie with a lot of heart and soul. It’s also a movie with great love for its subjects: the people involved and, for better and worse, the industry they helped build. It’s inspired by a...

In April 2022, two months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Italian author and political writer Giuliano da Empoli published a fictionalized account of Vladimir Putin’s ascent as seen through the eyes of his advisor. The Wizard of Kremlin almost immediately...

Let’s start here: Billy Crudup is one of our truly great actors. Early into Jay Kelly, written by Noah Baumbach and Emily Mortimer and directed by Baumbach, Crudup appears for a one-scene turn that jump-starts the narrative. Over drinks, his...

Hamnet is a great work of empathy and the best film Chloé Zhao has made by quite a wide margin. Adapted from the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell, who returns here as co-writer, the film serves as a lovely reminder...

The films of Mark Jenkin ooze a hypnotic, seasick sensibility; to watch them is to be lulled by their restless jumps through time and space, their ability to convert his home turf of Cornwall into a suspended world where facts...

In the rather niche academic field of monster studies, the common understanding of monstrosity is very similar to that of queerness: through being “different,” a monster destabilizes historical notions of normality and normativity, exposing how fictitious they were in the...