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

The intrepid writers from our Touching the Screen video game column have joined forces for Reverse Shot’s first-ever year-end games roundup.

Love Machina, Desire Lines, Sebastian, Bold Eagle, Stress Positions, I Saw the TV Glow

Maybe being trans is not the key to Hedwig. Maybe transition itself is. And transition is something that I find myself thinking about frequently, not just in regards to my own experiences with hormones and gender but in the way that my own views are constantly changing.

Part 2 of a special conversation on games and art featuring Destiny 2, Final Fantasy, Hitman, Tower of Druaga, Pathologic 2, and more.

In this special conversation for Touching the Screen, five critics discuss potential angles from which to approach video games as art.

The film presents itself as empathetic towards its protagonist but has little interest in navigating the murky terrain of what it means to exist as a fat, queer person in a world that loathes you.

A believable erotic tension builds in both silence and conversation. The film evinces a fascination with how people watch and learn from each other, its protagonists trying on different styles of performance.

Where the A. S. Byatt novel is more interested in how it presents historical details and toying with the stories that served as inspiration, insightfully analyzing and discussing everything from Chaucer to One Thousand and One Nights, Miller and co-writer Gore lean into the magic of fantasy.

Death and distance play a key role in many films nominated for the Queer Palm this year at Cannes, and many of them forgo a meaningful exploration of their characters’ desires.

His penchant for fantastic narratives has caused many to liken Hosoda to Miyazaki, but work hews closer to the heightened melodrama of his contemporaries in anime like Makoto Shinkai and Naoko Yamada. His tenderness and perpetual optimism are key to why Belle and his other films are as beautifully drawn as they are.

For all the adaptations and revisions that have existed over the decades, Spielberg and Kushner approach the material with sensitivity and an interest in richly expanding its characters that is nothing short of remarkable.

Many recent musicals have tried to ground themselves in realism or history itself, rarely breaking away to indulge in spectacle and never commenting on their approach to storytelling. Carax and Sparks, by contrast, aim to expose the artifice inherent in their production.