The Film Stage

A Pennsylvania Community Clashes in Exclusive Trailer for An American Pastoral

A Pennsylvania Community Clashes in Exclusive Trailer for An American Pastoral

Winner of the the Best Directing Award at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), as well as a selection at Hot Docs and more, French filmmaker Auberi Edler’s An American Pastoral goes deep inside the Pennsylvanian community of Elizabethtown to expore the political divide as it relates to key decisions in its public school system. […]

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Sundance Review: The Invite is a Knockout Relationship Comedy

Sundance Review: The Invite is a Knockout Relationship Comedy

Among Sundance’s great pleasures is the experience of a film steadily building buzz to the point where it becomes the talk of the fest. Seats become scarce and a unique electricity imbues a charge to those screenings. Just as trying to get into a showing of Celine Song’s Past Lives became a herculean task, so […]

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Rotterdam Review: Chronovisor Uncovers the Greatest Conspiracy Never Told

Rotterdam Review: Chronovisor Uncovers the Greatest Conspiracy Never Told

It’s a tall tale out of a Borges story, the wildest conspiracy theory you’ve never heard. In the 1960s, Italian Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti claimed to have invented a machine that allowed one to see and photograph the past. A contraption made of cathode rays, mysterious metals, and all kinds of strange antennae, the “chronovisor” […]

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Atropia Trailer: Alia Shawkat Goes Through the Motions of War in Sundance Winner

Atropia Trailer: Alia Shawkat Goes Through the Motions of War in Sundance Winner

Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where it picked up the Grand Jury Prize, Hailey Benton Gates’ debut feature Atropia has taken some time to find distribution. However, the Luca Guadagnino-produced satire starring Shawkat, Callum Turner, Zahra Alzubaidi, Tony Shawkat, Jane Levy, Tim Heidecker, Lola Kirke, and Chloe Sevigny will open before […]

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“I Want Somebody to Surprise Me”: Jennifer Lawrence on Die My Love, Lynne Ramsay’s Confidence, and the Directors She’d Love to Work With

“I Want Somebody to Surprise Me”: Jennifer Lawrence on Die My Love, Lynne Ramsay’s Confidence, and the Directors She’d Love to Work With

In Die My Love, Jennifer Lawrence is Grace, a writer whose life is disrupted when the arrival of a baby leads to a move to the sticks of Montana to be closer to the family of her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson). Whether it’s from a lack of sex, postpartum depression, writer’s block, a mental disorder, […]

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Peter Hujar’s Day Review: Ira Sachs Blends Documentary with Performance to Consider the Artist’s Life

Peter Hujar’s Day Review: Ira Sachs Blends Documentary with Performance to Consider the Artist’s Life

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 Sundance coverage. Peter Hujar’s Day opens in theaters on November 7. When I look at Peter Hujar’s portrait of poet Allen Ginsburg, taken on December 18, 1974, it’s strikingly nonchalant. Ginsberg is standing on the sidewalk, one hand in pocket and the other looped […]

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Nuremberg Review: A Historical Drama Lacking Complexity

Nuremberg Review: A Historical Drama Lacking Complexity

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 TIFF coverage. Nuremberg opens in theaters on November 7. Stanley Kubrick, in one of the most famous director disses ever, remarked that the failing of his friend Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was that the Holocaust was six million people being killed, while the film […]

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Emulsion Ep. 18 – Carlo Chatrian on the Tokyo International Film Festival and Future of Cinema Culture

Emulsion Ep. 18 – Carlo Chatrian on the Tokyo International Film Festival and Future of Cinema Culture

A world-cinema fixture who’s earned the support of Martin Scorsese, M. Night Shyamalan, Olivier Assayas, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Béla Tarr, Claire Denis, Christian Petzold, Tilda Swinton, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi––among many others––Carlo Chatrian reshaped the festival landscape with his work as artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival and Berlinale, his influence such that an abdication of […]

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Capturing Life Under Genocide: Sepideh Farsi on Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

Capturing Life Under Genocide: Sepideh Farsi on Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

One of the most heartbreaking documentaries of the year, Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk premiered at Cannes just weeks after the Israeli occupation murdered the film’s subject, 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist and poet Fatma Hassona. Constructed through passages of the director speaking with Hassona through FaceTime conversations, we get a glimpse […]

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Paul Schrader on Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters‘ 40-Years-Late Japanese Premiere

Paul Schrader on Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters‘ 40-Years-Late Japanese Premiere

Japan is hardly known for placing limits on cinema; one might posit that young cinephiles largely enter the nation’s incomprehensibly dense corpus through its most extreme offerings. While most accurately called an American project, almost universally hailed as a masterpiece, and hardly extreme in content––it takes a comparatively tame place among the director’s own oeuvre––Paul […]

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