The Film Stage

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 […]

The post Couture Trailer: Alice Winocour’s Angelina Jolie-Led Fashion Drama Arrives This June first appeared on The Film Stage.

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 […]

The post Cannes Review: Red Rocks Is Bruno Dumont at His Most Uncharacteristically Gentle first appeared on The Film Stage.

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 […]

The post Cannes Review: Sandra Wollner Meets the Moment With Sublime Everytime first appeared on The Film Stage.

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 […]

The post In the Grey Review: A Reflection on the Strange Career of Guy Ritchie first appeared on The Film Stage.

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 […]

The post Cannes Review: Nicolas Winding Refn Makes an Underwhelming Return with Her Private Hell first appeared on The Film Stage.

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 […]

The post Cannes Review: Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord Is a Thunderous, Opulent Triumph first appeared on The Film Stage.

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 […]

The post Cannes Review: Adèle Exarchopoulos Proves a Force of Nature in the Familiar Another Day first appeared on The Film Stage.

If Hollywood’s animation offerings have been fairly stale of late, look no further than the independent-filmmaking side for one of the year’s most inventive animations. Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki’s animation/live-action hybrid Bouchra is a debut feature that combines vulnerable storytelling, documentary techniques, and an anthropomorphized animated cast to portray a complex relationship between a […]

The post Exclusive Trailer for Bouchra Presents an Acclaimed, Personal Hybrid Animation first appeared on The Film Stage.

One of the most pernicious tendencies in the way we talk about cinema is to reduce films to quantifiable objects—things that can be assessed in terms of how much or little goes on in them. It’s the kind of approach that says a lot less about the movies themselves than it does about our dispiritingly […]

The post Cannes Review: Double Freedom Is an Entrancing Homecoming of Sorts for Lisandro Alonso first appeared on The Film Stage.

In Ben’Imana, the perpetrators of a genocide are being put on public trial, but it just as often feels like the families of their victims are being forced to plead their case. The first Rwandan film to premiere in Cannes’ official selection is set in 2012, a generation removed from the 1994 atrocities in which […]

The post Cannes Review: Ben’Imana Is a Powerful Drama About Lingering Anguish first appeared on The Film Stage.