The Film Stage

Cannes Review: László Nemes’ Moulin Is a Brooding, Engaging World War II Thriller

Cannes Review: László Nemes’ Moulin Is a Brooding, Engaging World War II Thriller

László Nemes began his career on a mountaintop that he’s struggled to scale ever since. Son of Saul was the rare first film that not only premiered in competition at Cannes but took home the Grand Prix (the first ever debut to do so) and carried influence all the way to the Academy Awards nine […]

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Cannes Review: I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning Is a Captivating, Polyphonous Ode to Friendship 

Cannes Review: I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning Is a Captivating, Polyphonous Ode to Friendship 

Clio Barnard returns to Directors’ Fortnight after The Selfish Giant and Ali & Ava with an adaptation of Keiran Goddard’s novel I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning. The director, whose Yorkshire upbringing is a site of belonging, has set her work in Northern England—Bradford specifically—but, honoring Goddard’s novel, places this film in post-industrial Birmingham.  I See […]

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Leos Carax’s Annette Follow-Up Lily May B to Shoot Next Year with Jenna Ortega

Leos Carax’s Annette Follow-Up Lily May B to Shoot Next Year with Jenna Ortega

Do not adjust your sets or fear that you’ve lost consciousness. Marking one of the more intriguing director-actor pairings in God knows how long, Leos Carax has, per Variety, secured Jenna Ortega to lead his next feature (and first since 2021’s Annette) Lily May B, which is expected to roll cameras in spring 2027 under […]

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Couture Trailer: Alice Winocour’s Angelina Jolie-Led Fashion Drama Arrives This June

Couture Trailer: Alice Winocour’s Angelina Jolie-Led Fashion Drama Arrives This June

Seemingly cornering the recent market on Hollywood star-driven, auteur-directed French productions after Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin last week, Vertical picked up Alice Winocour’s Angelina Jolie-led Couture following its TIFF premiere last year. With a cast also including Louis Garrel, Ella Rumpf, Garance Marillier, Anyier Anei, and Vincent Lindon, the film follows an […]

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Cannes Review: Red Rocks Is Bruno Dumont at His Most Uncharacteristically Gentle

Cannes Review: Red Rocks Is Bruno Dumont at His Most Uncharacteristically Gentle

Seen through a child’s eyes, the French Riviera suggests heaven on Earth. For the three at the heart of Bruno Dumont’s Red Rocks—Geo (Kaylon Lancel), Manon (Louise Podolski), and Rouben (Mohamed Coly)—their small town is all they know, with new adventures every day as they ride dirt bikes along the seafront or find new heights […]

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Cannes Review: Sandra Wollner Meets the Moment With Sublime Everytime

Cannes Review: Sandra Wollner Meets the Moment With Sublime Everytime

In Everytime, a sun-dappled film about death and love that might be the best in Cannes this year, the terrible loss of a teenage girl’s life leaves her mother, younger sister, and boyfriend bound in mutual devastation. Set in present-day East Berlin during the balmy months of the year, this is a film that appears […]

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In the Grey Review: A Reflection on the Strange Career of Guy Ritchie

In the Grey Review: A Reflection on the Strange Career of Guy Ritchie

In the Grey, written and directed by Guy Ritchie, is a nifty bit of entertainment. Ninety minutes long before credits and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Henry Cavill, and Eiza González, the action thriller concerns a small group of “extraction specialists” who specialize in getting very powerful people to pay their debts. They often work in the […]

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Cannes Review: Nicolas Winding Refn Makes an Underwhelming Return with Her Private Hell

Cannes Review: Nicolas Winding Refn Makes an Underwhelming Return with Her Private Hell

Almost ten years to the day since The Neon Demon’s premiere, Nicolas Winding Refn returns to Cannes with Her Private Hell—a film wherein the internet’s it girl du jour Sophie Thatcher is captured quite beautifully through the Danish filmmaker’s heightened, neo-noir style. With the film’s wafer-thin plot and essentially non-existent characters, however, the one-time enfant […]

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Cannes Review: Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord Is a Thunderous, Opulent Triumph

Cannes Review: Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord Is a Thunderous, Opulent Triumph

A soft upright piano playing “Amazing Grace” drapes in warmly over the opening image of Fjord: a powder-blue-hued glacial mountain towering over the glistening Norwegian fjord around which Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) and Mihai Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan) have resettled their seven-person family. Lisbet, a Norwegian nurse, and Mihai, a Romanian aeronautical engineer, just moved to the […]

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Cannes Review: Adèle Exarchopoulos Proves a Force of Nature in the Familiar Another Day

Cannes Review: Adèle Exarchopoulos Proves a Force of Nature in the Familiar Another Day

Garance (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is her name, and she’s proud of it: of being a feminist, a liberated woman, of having caring friends, loving family, and the most affectionate partner in the whole world. What she’s not pleased about is her past. Garance is an alcoholic now cultivating the not-so-obvious art of abstinence. It took her […]

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