Brazilian director Walter Salles has made a number of powerful, expertly crafted films over his career, including the 1998 Central Station and 2004 The Motorcycle Diaries. He’s back now, after a decade away from features, with I’m Still Here, set […]
The post A Conversation with Walter Salles (I’M STILL HERE) appeared first on Hammer to Nail.
Lee Je-hoon, Koo Kyo-ywan, and Hong Xa-bin star in Lee Jong-pil’s action-adventure, as a defector tries to cross the border of North and South Korea.
Selected for TIFF’s Platform section (Toronto’s only competition section), French-born filmmaker Nora El Hourch pulled from some of her own narrative for her high tempo feature debut. Known domestically as HLM Pussy and internationally as Sisterhood, El Hourch delves into the intricate dynamics of friendship as it explores how three teenage girls grapple with the implications of the #MeToo movement in the context of their lives, where factors like race, social class, and cultural privilege can occasionally create divisions. At the center of it all we find Amina (Leah Aubert) — stuck in the middle, trying to fit and desperate to belong.… Read the rest
Arriving like a molotov cocktail thrown through a plate glass window — or more accurately, like a hashtag gone viral — Nora El Hourch makes an unforgettable first impression with her fiery feature debut Sisterhood. Where La Haine became a cinematic, mid-90s touchstone with its gritty, unblinking depiction of France’s racial tensions, El Hourch’s picture may do the same for this generation as they take hold of the next wave of feminism and the #MeToo movement and pull it into the future.
The much better, and more provocative French title, HLM Pussy, gives a better sense of the context of the picture’s electric charge.… Read the rest
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: DTCV’s Histoire Seule, directed by Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh has always been a very prolific director. Even going so far as making more media in his early retirement, around the early 2010’s, than most directors make in their lifetime. That ‘early retirement’ became somewhat of a joke, even though Soderbergh himself has stated it was meant to be more of a sabbatical, as he returned barely a few years later in full force. But let’s not treat it as a cinematic meme, but explore some of the things Soderbergh did in this sabbatical in the Sound and Vision, because it includes his sole music video directorial credit…
While we’ve still not learned what Bertrand Bonello’s “completely different” follow-up to The Beast might be, it’s safe to say a verdant 2024 put his stock at a record high. In the meantime he’s made the rare venture into scoring another director’s film: his soundtrack for Aude Léa Rapin’s Planet B has popped up on […]
The post Listen to Bertrand Bonello’s Soundtrack for Planet B first appeared on The Film Stage.
Berlinale alumni in Park Chan-wook, Justine Triet and the Eat The Night tandem of Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel have been selected to present their latest works in the Berlinale Shorts 2025 – To Be in This World. As we await Park Chan-wook’s next feature film (currently in production) No Other Choice, he re-teamed with Park Chan-kyong for Paranmanjang (aka Night Fishing). It’s coined as a fairy tale about death and reincarnation, transmigration and the sounds of music. From Palme d’Or winning director for Anatomy of a Fall, we find Triet re-teaming with actress Laetitia Dosch (2013’s Age of Panic) for Vilaine fille mauvais garçon (Two Ships).… Read the rest
Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2024, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists. Last year I used this space to speak about the ongoing genocide occurring in Gaza and this year, that genocide is still going on. I spoke about how the filmmakers who were […]
The post Soham Gadre’s Top 10 Films of 2024 first appeared on The Film Stage.
Last week we posted an article listing our favorite films from 2024, and one entry in it was Robert Eggers’ new take on Nosferatu. It was notable for at least two reasons. One: it only premièred at Christmas so not many people had seen it yet and STILL it made it into the list. And two: the official review here on our site was pretty negative. So what to do, when we see such different views on the same topic? We post a multi-writer article with a bunch of mini-reviews, that’s what! Divisiveness in opinion is awesome, so once again we had a quick round-up of opinions about the film, and have put them up here for all to see, in a gallery. As usual,…
