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

Like all cultural practices, film acting is a historical palimpsest: new affects, tones, and gestures jostle with older ones, and what makes something feel contemporary is often a matter of some contingency.

For the third year, Museum of the Moving Image film curators have visited the Cannes Film Festival and have engaged in a dialogue about the films on offer.

If consumers are paying the big bucks for a game (especially one they have technically already played), what are they actually getting? Padding is, unfortunately, almost always the answer, but Rebirth takes it one step further by padding an arguably padded extension of a fragment of an existing game.

The film is another of brothers Bill and Turner Ross’s immersions in the regional euphoric...The filmmakers are after a kind of Herzogian ecstatic truth, often to be found in the kinds of spaces where someone is likely to be rolling on literal ecstasy.

The strange metaphysical mingling of ersatz furniture and moments of raw human authenticity on game showsfeels like a rupture. These programs are traversable on-ramps for real people to appear as real people in the big leagues of television.

These are films about transients and transience, punctuated by soft dissolves and ellipses; sometimes people fade out of the frame like smoke, or vanish and reappear further away. Shimizu’s formalism and his humanism go hand in hand.

For Hurston, it was most important to define Black culture in continuity and coherence; but even as she nobly destabilized the disingenuous objectivity and authority of the discipline, she does not quite upend the colonial configurations of an institution that has generally pathologized Black life and transformed it into spectacle.

The most striking films I saw while attending the 21st edition of True/False Film Fest in the quaint college town of Columbia, Missouri, had me pondering fulfillment and disconnection in the technological age.

The technical bombast retains its power, but the extended cut is concerned with more emotional matters. In the early, banal behavior of the working-stiff crew, in their interactions and the unsaid meanings behind innocuous utterances and the contradictory, incongruous interactions of lapsed lovers, there is authenticity.

This film is incendiary, but it should be discussed not just for its controversy. What makes this film significant is how it engages with the iconography of IP superhero blockbuster cinema and with the trans film image.

While it is now customary to view most online content in this manner, it is still surreal to see vertical images in a cinematic context, despite being, as “Shifting Perspectives” demonstrates, one of the initial ways moving images were conceived in the late 19th century.

Threaded throughout No Other Land are scenes conveying the warm friendship between Abraham and Adra, who is initially skeptical of whether his companion’s exposés will have much effect; their chats, filmed by Szor, are oases of communion and symbolic potential in a rocky, increasingly insecure landscape.

The village first drew Zhang Mengqi back as a subject in filmmaker Wu Wenguang’s Folk Memory Project, a collection of oral histories from people who lived through the Great Famine.

Sure, I make films as an artistic pursuit as an artist, but I make films to help my characters, my friends first.