Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

At the heart of Benning’s practice is an unmistakably avant-garde thesis: ordinary ways of experiencing reality need to be transcended with the help of cinema.

Cobbled together from home movies that the Brazilian director amassed throughout four decades living in Paris, the film constructs an autobiography of sorts from what its author happened to film over the years.

It’s an expansive visual travel journal—Chidgasornpongse rode all of Thailand’s train lines over the course of six years—though on screen it seems as though it’s all happening in a single day (represented in 102 minutes of footage).

Through its oversaturated, auto-exposed, and coarsely textured images, Let the Summer Never Come Again makes visible the mechanisms of its fiction.

The Shape of Water; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; The Disaster Artist; The Killing of a Sacred Deer; Rat Film; Wonder Woman; Victoria & Abdul; Beauty and the Beast; City of Ghosts; Baby Driver; Wind River; I Love You, Daddy

Syrian filmmaker Ziad Kalthoum has created a study of men anguished by conflict without ever exploiting their predicament.

In just 50 minutes, nooks and crannies of humanity are explored with a deftness and potency it would normally take a six-part TV series to uncover.

Spanning three visits to Chongqing over the course of one year, the film focuses on three of Shibati’s residents as they reckon with forced displacement and the dismantling of their homes and businesses.

Shot in Poland for 35 days over the course of a year, this debut feature unfolds in a measured and unvarnished style that reflects the anthropologist eye of director Anna Zamecka.

Ghost Hunting, which won a special prize at the 2017 Berlinale for Palestinian filmmaker Raed Andoni, is a relatively cool and sober restaging of interrogations and tortures suffered by prisoners in the Israeli interrogation center Moskobiya.

In Colo, three relatively ordinary people, a teenage girl and her two parents, are struggling to make ends meet. But by the end of the film, they are entirely new, having been shattered by trauma and reassembled into damaged, isolated individuals.

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.

A Quiet Passion, The Human Surge, Personal Shopper, Ex-Libris: The New York Public Library, BPM (Beats Per Minute), Phantom Thread, Nocturama, Wonderstruck, By the Time It Gets Dark, Faces Places

What I am interested in the most is creating a demand for a different kind of cinema. Then maybe the authorities will realize it is time to change the rules.