We have been publishing Reverse Shot for 15 years, and when it comes to maintaining our optimism and enthusiasm for the medium we all ostensibly love, we have had our ups and downs. But things feel hopeful as of late, both in terms of filmmaking and in film criticism.
A brutal, but immaculately balanced and ultimately empathetic effect gives Hogg’s films an almost overwhelmingly tangible sentimentality. Her depiction of inexpressiveness is deeply expressive. Her silences are unbearable and beautiful at once.
The oeuvre of Sabiha Sumar is essentially a feminist one, and more importantly, a Muslim feminist one. It is with this perspective that she questions, searches, and resolves.
He wraps grand metaphysical ideas in deeply human stories, letting viewers feel the imaginary. With his last two features, Lowery takes us into fantasy worlds yet supplies real questions to chew on.
Emancipating the image feels like a goal in Hale County, which loosely follows the lives of Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, ballplayers who are simply living and striving and working.
Just as Kate had no access to footage of Christine Chubbuck while preparing to play her, the residents of Bisbee must invent backstories, postulate connections between their roles and themselves, and develop entirely new countenances with no objective reference points.
Blake Williams has achieved a holistic union of his own that speaks at once to the transformative power of the moving image and the oceanic force of its full deployment.
Over the course of the film, Bohdanowicz and Juliane live together as strangers for 30 days, which allows the audience to get to know Juliane at the same time as Bohdanowicz does.
Bujalski has utilized this business as a rich backdrop for one of the most unusual films of the year: a day-in-the-life character portrait of a working woman of color that is frequently hilarious yet firmly rooted in her undeniable melancholia.
It is a playful thing, rattling with little bibelots, and this is for the good, for we could use more games amid the self-serious heft of so much contemporary cinema.
Cinema like architecture is an art concerned with grace, proportion, and a mindfulness of human needs, things which become increasingly difficult to control or bear in mind as size and budget metastasize.
Were Evangeline more sympathetic and self-aware, we might ask ourselves how our enjoyment of Howard is so different from hers of Madeline, and how our continued appetite for performances of female psychological fracture fits into a history of condescension and exploitation.
The basic material of BlacKkKlansman is custom-made to be described as provocative, even though it is hard to pick out a moment in the finished film that would possibly provoke or discomfit someone already inclined to buy a ticket to a Spike Lee movie called BlacKkKlansman.
Akhavan is fascinated by the moment of seduction, like the precise tipping point when a playful kick turns into a nudging invitation. She is also interested in the moment when the spell breaks.
Filling the big screen canvas with the small-screen desktop space, Unfriended: Dark Web is cinema for the age of the post-cinematic affect.