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

Summer Hours is a film about the inevitability of movement—of time, of people, of industry—yet also the ways in which human nature strives to avoid long-term variation; how we try to smuggle poignancy into a seemingly inhospitable economic landscape.

The Invitation, The Ghost Train, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, A Scary Time, Messiah of Evil, Panna a netvor

Rather than charting the trajectories of her characters towards enlightened maturity, Hittman asks them to feel their way through the emotional dark, guided by impulse, rerouted and misdirected by social pressures.

Writer/director Jim McKay’s fifth feature, and his first since 2005’s Angel Rodriguez, is his most tightly plotted film yet, propelled by a momentum that’s often exhilaratingly fleet. Yet his emphasis on his characters’ everyday stakes keeps the film from feeling lightweight.

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.

The Birds, Lake Mungo, Diabolique, Dead Ringers, Island of Lost Souls, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Martin

A Gentle Creature is more of a destabilizing shock to the system than a call to arms, a confrontation with a broken state rather than a blueprint to rebuild it. It confirms Loznitsa as a master craftsman of the impeccably designed and crafted hellscape, politically charged and all-consuming.