De Lo Mio begins with a tidy visual metaphor: a man carefully opens many blinds to let light into a dark room. The three siblings in Diana Peralta’s debut featu...
Marcus Lindeen’s documentary The Raft boasts such a compelling story that it could have easily coasted on its trove of archival materials. In 1973, Mexican anth...
Eyes might be the windows to the soul, but in technical filmic terms, they are a dead giveaway for the macro failures of a visual effects team. CGI and motion-c...
The Lego Movie largely succeeded for two reasons: one, Lord & Miller’s gag-heavy comedic sensibility meshed well with Animal Logic’s kinetic, stop-motion-in...
One of the unfortunate byproducts of living under the Trump administration is being necessarily aware of ancillary right-wing partisans that have contributed to...
Like many directorial debuts, Attack the Block was an ideal venture for writer-director Joe Cornish to exercise his pet obsessions. The cult-film-in-the-making ...
In Welcome to Marwen, director Robert Zemeckis uses the real-life story of artist and photographer Mark Hogancamp as a fantastical canvas to interrogate his own...
With Bumblebee, director Travis Knight and writer Christina Hodson weave together two different movies: 1) A sensitive, familiar riff on E.T. about a young girl...
Mary Poppins Returns can’t possibly be expected to transcend its historical foundation. It’s been over half a century since the Disney original seeped its way i...
For anyone still invested in big-budget Hollywood studio films that foreground original voices and singular visions, the glut of superhero movies represent some...
Vikram Murthi is a freelance writer and critic from Chicago and currently based in Brooklyn. Aside from The Film Stage, he has written for The A.V. Club, Vulture, RogerEbert.com, The Nation, Reverse Shot, and more. He will write about anything for anyone willing to pay him.
