The Film Stage

Sure, July is bringing back the Fantastic Four (July 25), Superman (July 11), and Jurassic Park (July 2), but they aren’t the reboot that caught my eye. No, that distinction belongs to Rihanna is Smurfette (July 18). Not only is...

Welcome to The B-Side! Here we sometimes talk about movie stars! We sometimes talk about movie directors! Today, we talk about both! Specifically, the B-Sides of the Mission: Impossible franchise. It’s just Conor and I today folks, waxing poetic on...

Perhaps no line of dialogue better encapsulates lived experience than this bon mot offered by John Huston’s Noah Cross: “Of course I’m respectable. I’m old! Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” I thought...

After taking the longest break of his career since 2018’s Outlaw King, David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water) is back with Relay. The thriller, starring Riz Ahmed, Lily James, Sam Worthington, Willa Fitzgerald, Matthew Maher, and Victor Garber, premiered at...

What a pleasure it is to see Kiyoshi Kurosawa in his Hong Sangsoo period. The typically prolific filmmaker had an especially verdant 2024: his all-killer, no-filler Chime; Serpent’s Path, a plenty worthy remake of his major 1998 feature; and Cloud, which seems entrenched...

In Videoheaven, Blockbuster––to take after Thom Andersen––plays itself. Now deep in a pop-cultural-scholarship phase inaugurated by his last feature Pavements, Alex Ross Perry has made a generous, absorbing three-hour essay film-cum-documentary on nothing else but video-rental stores, those fabled and...

After a busy last summer with Hit Man and Twisters, Glen Powell is back this fall with Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Running Man. With a cast also including Katy O’Brian, Daniel Ezra, Karl Glusman, Josh Brolin, Lee...

Following the sensation that was The Worst Person in the World, Danish-Norwegian director Joachim Trier returned to Cannes Film Festival with Sentimental Value, a story of family and filmmaking that earned him the Cannes Grand Prix. Led by Renate Reinsve,...

Even more frighteningly relevant than when I first saw it at the New York Film Festival last fall, prior to the new wave of Trump-fronted fascism, Petra Costa’s Apocalypse in the Tropics lucidly explores how evangelical Christianity is inseparable from Brazil’s far-right...

We’re now less than three months away from Paul Thomas Anderson’s highly anticipated One Battle After Another. The September 26 release, which would set it up nicely for a fall festival run if PTA so desires, will feature an IMAX...