The Film Stage

A welcome annual tradition, the Directors Guild of America gathered their nominees for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Theatrical Feature Film—Paul Thomas Anderson (One Battle After Another), Ryan Coogler (Sinners), Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein), Josh Safdie (Marty Supreme), and Chloé Zhao (Hamnet)––for an extensive conversation spanning nearly two-and-a-half hours, longer than the majority of the films […]

The post Watch a 2.5-Hour Conversation with Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Coogler, Josh Safdie, Guillermo del Toro, and Chloé Zhao first appeared on The Film Stage.

Last week, the jury president of the Berlin Film Festival claimed that this year’s edition would provide an “opposite” to politics. If such a thing exists, it certainly doesn’t look anything like Faraz Shariat’s sophomore feature Prosecution—a narratively propulsive yet finely detailed procedural (all props to screenwriter Claudia Schaefer) that overflows with political statements, ideas, […]

The post Berlinale Review: Prosecution is a Propulsive Investigation Into Far-Right Violence first appeared on The Film Stage.

Non-fiction cinema is before and after Frederick Wiseman, an indisputable notion that loses no import with the news, made official by his own Zipporah Films, that the artist behind—let’s name just a fraction—Titticut Follies, High School, The Store, Welfare, Central Park, and Belfast, Maine, plus recent triumphs At Berkeley, City Hall, National Gallery, Ex Libris, […]

The post Frederick Wiseman Dies at 96 first appeared on The Film Stage.

When I think about a quintessential Isabelle Huppert film, I like to defer to a largely forgotten feature that will soon turn ten: Serge Bozon’s 2017 Mrs. Hyde. I say “quintessential” because Huppert has long excelled at playing beleaguered women who wake up to their more devilish personas, and that reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s […]

The post Berlinale Review: An Extraordinary Isabelle Huppert Dwarfs Everyone Else In Ulrike Ottinger’s Campy The Blood Countess first appeared on The Film Stage.

Any film that earns you, personally, the greatest number of Oscars since Walt Disney is a tough act to follow, so one must admire Sean Baker’s lack of pretension in succeeding Anora with a tribute to one of the, let’s say, three least-reputable film genres: ’60s / ’70s Italian sex comedies. Speaking with Variety, the […]

The post Sean Baker, Miguel Gomes, Véréna Paravel, Laura Citarella, and Eduardo Williams Plot New Films first appeared on The Film Stage.

There’s a melancholy to Tobias Nölle and Loran Bonnardot’s Tristan Forever that is comforting. A lingering, existential question hangs over everything: where does one belong? In the film, a Parisian doctor (Bonnardot himself) decides to permanently move to the South Atlantic Ocean island Tristan da Cunha, one of the most remote places in the world. […]

The post Berlinale Review: Tristan Forever Highlights a Jaded Doctor’s Search for Purpose first appeared on The Film Stage.

It’s the last day of junior high for Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) and her best friend Callie (Chloe Coleman); the veil of adulthood has never felt as thin as it does on that late-June morning in the car, blasting Michelle Branch’s 2002 pop hit “All You Wanted.” Branch belts “If you want to, I can […]

The post Berlinale Review: Mouse Offers a Tender Companion After Loss first appeared on The Film Stage.

The new film from Anthony Chen takes a minute to find its rhythm. For the first hour or so of its admittedly substantial runtime, I couldn’t help but wonder if an LLM, prompted to make the most normcore script imaginable, would be able to conjure a story of such modest simplicity. Stick with it a […]

The post Berlinale Review: We Are All Strangers Channels Edward Yang to Kitschy But Compelling Ends first appeared on The Film Stage.

To belong to the diaspora is to inhabit a paradox: a state of in-betweenness, neither fully inside or outside one’s home and adoptive countries. Films trying to map that condition also tend to feel somewhat “suspended,” populated as they are by characters grappling with a double consciousness—“either I’m nobody,” Derek Walcott captured that limbo in […]

The post Berlinale Review: Alain Gomis’ Dao is a Riveting Family Saga first appeared on The Film Stage.

Moulding cruel or nihilistic characters into darkly attractive protagonists requires a deceptively delicate touch. We’ve grown so used to seeing it done effortlessly that a movie like Rosebush Pruning can perhaps be some useful reminder of how difficult it is to pull off. The latest from Brazilian sensualist Karim Aïnouz (of Futuro Beach and The Invisible […]

The post Berlinale Review: Rosebush Pruning is a Maximalist, Muddled Attempt at Cinematic Transgression first appeared on The Film Stage.