New York City can swallow you whole. It can be an uncaring place with busied people walking down frustrated avenues. It's not that the city is mean or that the...
Lee Daniels wants to do it all. The filmmaker behind Monster’s Ball, Precious, and The Butler has made an endlessly compelling horror movie, The Deliverance, f...
James Ivory has made so many films. And of the forty-plus he’s made––nearly everything under the Merchant Ivory Productions banner––many are masterpieces. Trul...
Welcome to a new episode from The Film Stage! It’s not The Film Stage Show. It’s not The B-Side! It’s something else! It’s a Box Office Bonanza from The Film S...
What if Jacques Tati made a film noir? The Falling Star offers a commendable answer to this question, though the final result does not quite live up to such ex...
In early 1950, Ernest Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees was serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine before being published as a novel in September of...
How does culture survive in the midst of a war? Rule of Two Walls––written, directed, and edited by David Gutnik––asks the question and attempts to answer it. ...
Let's talk about the pandemic for a moment. No, not the COVID-19 Pandemic. The pandemic that, 100 years ago, killed millions and shuttered the United States fo...
Welcome to The B-Side, from The Film Stage. Here we talk about movie stars! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they ma...
Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur is a rare sort these days. Here is a director who has built a successful, decades-long career making solid, genre-heavy p...
Dan Mecca is the co-founder and managing editor of The Film Stage. He is a producer and filmmaker living in Pittsburgh. He watches a lot of movies and tracks them on Letterboxd.