The Stage

Mar 25, 2018 — Since our last roundup on new issues, two more publications have each put out another. The new March 2018 issue of Film Criticism opens with Julia Vassilieva’s essay on Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan (2014; image above). “While earlier discussions of the...

Mar 22, 2018 — New York. There’s a series currently running at the Metrograph through Monday with a very long title. Ready? Something About Stray Dogs: Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs and a Kurosawa Retrospective. The films have been hand-picked by Anderson, who says,...

Mar 12, 2018 — When the SXSW Film Festival presented the world premiere of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One last night, “technical difficulties KO’ed the sound for the second time in a row, bringing the dizzying, VFX-fueled video game adventure to a grinding halt...

Mar 8, 2018 — Let’s start with some festival news, primarily because a big one, SXSW, is opening tomorrow in Austin. Jay Duplass is on the cover of the new issue of the Austin Chronicle, which features a whopping preview package. “Few filmmaker names...

Feb 20, 2018 — In this wildly inventive revenge drama, director Kon Ichikawa blurs the line between stage and screen, infusing kabuki traditions with his own extravagant visual sensibility.

Feb 14, 2018 — With her acclaimed new film Western opening in theaters this week, we spoke with German director Valeska Grisebach on the romantic ideals of the quintessential American genre.

Jan 30, 2018 — “In what he describes as a ‘forward’ to this film, director Jan Svankmajer—talking straight to the camera and fluffing his lines repeatedly—admits that he doesn’t actually know what this, apparently his final picture, is about.” So begins Wendy Ide in...

Jan 21, 2018 — “Filmed entirely within an emergency call center, Danish director Gustav Möller’s The Guilty (Den skyldige) is a claustrophobic thriller that finds fascinating ways to transcend, spiritually, its confines,” begins Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “Pretty much the whole film...

Jan 20, 2018 — We begin with April Wolfe, writing for Film Comment and introducing us to Maxim Pozdorovkin and Our New President, which “tells a thrilling, scary, mind-bending, and often-hilarious story of Russian propaganda’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, constructed almost...

Jan 5, 2018 — For the seventh year running, the First Look festival at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York presents “formally inventive new works that seek to redefine the art form while engaging in a wide range of subjects and...