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

Stasis, represented through this motionless object, allows us to make sense of the contradictions and the inevitability of change in this family. Where Noriko’s world is increasingly riddled with cracks, the vase is sturdy and whole; where her future is in a motion she cannot control, the vase is comfortably still.

The film recontextualized my experience with all the French cinema that I had seen before, expanding definitions of beauty and humor and what it is to capture an experience, real or imagined, unapologetically.

Binoche expresses such a range of emotions that we cannot be sure what her endgame is. She won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her role, an honor that recognizes her ability to captivate an audience even in a performance that keeps shifting and changing registers before our eyes.

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.

To view Coppola’s plots as flimsy or nonexistent is to miss the point. The depth of her work is not characterized by meaning, but by organization. The character portraits, spaces, and sounds that comprise her films foster a unified vision of emptiness.

Human languages are processed sequentially: left to right, right to left, top to bottom. Arrival draws parallels between our understanding of sentences and our notions of time and space, and then envisions a world without these boundaries.