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

The films of Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy are a welcome reminder of how a reverence for and attention to classic tenets of filmmaking—indeed, to the rich history of cinema, both mainstream and independent—can still yield surprising, thrilling results.

Silent Friend is most engaging in how it uses its broad scope to accrue a Wunderkammer of vaguely related niche subjects. The film’s conviction that its plants are full characters is best realized through its investigation into how changing technology opens new ways for humans to understand them.

As he is playing a film director trying desperately to get his next project off the ground, Vasyanovych’s presence imparts extra import to a film about how art can best speak to a politically charged moment.

In such difficult times, nostalgia remains a lifeblood for characters who risk losing themselves. Moonglow looks back down roads not taken, images and gestures emanating through the hazy humidity of the Manila night like cigarette smoke.

Although the film is constructed as a love letter to Alexander von Humboldt, it reveals something larger: the state of a nation that has abandoned his wisdom.

The resulting tension undermines the initial project and becomes the subject of the film, revealing the uneasy power dynamics at play between filmmaker and participants.

Documenting the high-stakes Chocobar trial and unraveling the state’s deceptions requires a certain amount of linear and coherent storytelling, which Martel has traditionally resisted in her films.

The interpersonal drama gets at interrelated ideas of property ownership, kinship, and freedom (meaning either independence or loneliness), as the automotive sprawl of America’s built environment flows past.

Ken Jacobs turned daily life into mind-expanding perceptual adventures. It is fitting that his final long-form work is a record of his own haircut in Chinatown by his favorite barber, Shirley, at the V1 Hair Salon on 50 Bayard Street.

While expanding consciousness can be generative, it can also be discomforting, as the First Look 2026 avant-garde shorts program “Little Stabs” suggests. Deriving its name from Jacobs’s Little Stabs at Happiness (1960), these twelve films encapsulate Jacobs’s “expansion of consciousness.”

In a perfect world, every family would have its own version of It Goes That Quick. This tender film from Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus captures the banality and the beauty of family with a cinematic flair that adds a distinct structural and artistic dimension to everyday conversations and events.

The second of the Five Precepts in Tibetan Buddhism addresses stealing, advising practitioners not to take what has not been given. 100 Sunset is a wintry work of slow cinema, is a meditation on what is taken, what is freely given, and what cannot be returned.

It is impossible to imagine the film being made with live actors; if it were, it would lose a crucial source of tension. As so many key conversations in the film swirl around authenticity in artmaking and identity, it’s pointed for the film’s visuals to encourage you to question everything you are watching.

These explorations of the psychological effects of fame are mostly decorative, frequently splitting the difference between timeless and timeworn.