The Film Stage

What exactly is artificial intelligence? Where does it come from? And precisely how powerful is (or will) it become? Valerie Veatch’s documentary Ghost in the Machine digs into these answers and finds things both disturbing and unsurprising. This is a fairly brisk, fairly standard documentation of the evolution of artificial intelligence—effective, dispiriting, and disappointingly mundane. […]

The post Sundance Review: Ghost in the Machine Lays Out the Evils on Which A.I. is Built first appeared on The Film Stage.

Following up Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and his Oscar-winning Drive My Car with Evil Does Not Exist, which was shot in secret, more info is coming together for Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s next feature, All of a Sudden. The French production, starring Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, landed at the top spot in our 100 most-anticipated […]

The post First Look at Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden Starring Virginie Efira first appeared on The Film Stage.

Even before his campaign for the removal of indigenous people from their land in the 1800s, Thomas Jefferson was pillaging burial grounds under the guise of scientific understanding. His actions predate those by countless archaeologists who followed suit: disturbing and excavating the remains of the dead and hoarding their bodies and / or the objects […]

The post Sundance Review: Aanikoobijigan Demands a Necessary Reclamation first appeared on The Film Stage.

A kaleidoscopic celebration of creativity and the boundaries of free speech, David Shadrack Smith’s Public Access revisits the birth of cable television, providing a complex oral history of its promises as a mirror for society and the first wave of media-creator culture. Initially, the radical democracy and experimentation of public-access television mirrored the work of […]

The post Sundance Review: Public Access is a Kaleidoscopic Celebration of Creativity first appeared on The Film Stage.

Kicking off next week, the 2026 Berlinale will bring no shortage of new discoveries, and one on our radar is the feature debut from Saša Vajda. The lights, they fall—starring Mohammed Yassin Ben Majdouba, Flor Prieto Catemaxca, Mahira Hakberdieva, Safet Bajraj, and Shanthi Philipp—follows a 16-year-old who drifts through summer on the outskirts of Berlin […]

The post Exclusive Trailer for Saša Vajda’s Berlinale Premiere The Lights, They Fall first appeared on The Film Stage.

After directing six (!) new films between 2020 and 2024, Zhang Yimou took a bit of a breather last year, but he’s now back this month with a new spy thriller. The Chinese director’s latest feature Scare Out stars Jackson Yee (recently seen in Bi Gan’s Resurrection) alongside Zhu Yilong, Song Jia, Lei Jiayin, Yang […]

The post Scare Out Trailer: Zhang Yimou’s Spy Thriller Starring Jackson Yee Arrives This Month first appeared on The Film Stage.

As the world continues fermenting its vile culture, the gang behind The State and Wet Hot American Summer is back to save you from the merciless onslaught of bad news. At least for 90 minutes. The dynamic duo of director David Wain and screenwriter Ken Marino are now in their third decade of bringing a […]

The post Sundance Review: Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is David Wain’s Hilarious Ode to LA first appeared on The Film Stage.

Finding poetic beauty in the quotidian, Walter Thompson-Hernández’s If I Go Will They Miss Me centers on coming of age in housing projects of southern Los Angeles. It’s a way of life often depicted with a grittiness that favors do-or-die intensity, yet this emerging director of great promise takes an opposite approach. One where dreams […]

The post Sundance Review: If I Go Will They Miss Me Finds Poetic Beauty in Coming of Age first appeared on The Film Stage.

A brisk docu-thriller that could do more with the richness of the players it chronicles, Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s Hanging by a Wire is not without thrills and human drama. Yet it seems focused more on a death-defying rescue than on what could be done to prevent this from happening again. Mixing archival materials—including cell phone, […]

The post Sundance Review: Hanging by a Wire is a Brisk Docu-Thriller Lacking Depth first appeared on The Film Stage.

Taking a genre familiar to Sundance audiences and creating something distinct, if not entirely original, Ramzi Bashour’s road-trip drama Hot Water finds subtle humor in two characters who feel entirely disconnected from each other despite the home and DNA they share. Layal (Lubna Azabal) is a Lebanese professor living in Indiana, teaching an Arabic class to students […]

The post Sundance Review: Hot Water Offers a Distinct Take on Familiar Genre first appeared on The Film Stage.