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

As the old joke goes, “An illiterate wizard and his goat walk out of a bar…” Never heard it? Clearly, David Yates assumes you have.

Mystery Train is concerned with the rise after the fall, focused on those scraping and struggling not for greatness or fame but merely the ability to function, to relate, to survive.

Where better to turn for a little contemporary understanding of America than a film that presents 1850s Oregon with all the Technicolor pomp and lumberjack circumstance of an overblown 1950s musical?

If there exists one piece of solid proof that aging gracefully is still a possibility in an era of sequels, prequels, and remakes, it’s Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset.

I wish that I could say “mission accomplished,” but my mouth is currently full of fried fish goodness. Consider it a perverse act of junk food solidarity from me to you, Mr. Spurlock. May it bring you fond memories of Day Eight.

Say what you will about Tarantino’s loving appropriation of B-movie tropes, grindhouse thematics, and kung-fu culture, but don’t be so quick to overlook the second installment’s characterization, a cagey evolutionary leap from the frenetic, hack-and-slash avatar development of Vol. 1.

There is no more euphoric or enlightening depiction of afterlife logistics and heavenly bureaucracy than Albert Brooks’s 1991 rumination Defending Your Life.

First and foremost, Jackson’s series reaffirmed that bigger can, in fact, be better, and director’s cuts can, indeed, be more than mere bouts of auteur narcissism.

The Classical Hollywood Musical has come to be recollected and revered as a form of social prozac, born in the depression of the Thirties in an effort to prove a simple theory: throw enough sparkle in the spectators’ eyes, and they’ll forget that they’re waiting in line for bread.

New media has relentlessly dug its cyber-claws into the heart of cinema for over 20 years now, constantly raising the bar in an industry of simulacra manipulation that seems to be entirely without limits.

Some six years after Paul Verhoeven gave us the beheaded reporter, CNN and FoxNews gave America the embedded reporter. Evolution? Hardly.