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

The story of American identity in the 21st century cannot be told without acknowledging that social media has shifted the ways we talk, interact, and forge communities.

It is a narrative reframing that suggests not empowerment from disempowerment, but rather, redemption through the redefinition of acceptable terms of success. And by overturning the traditional power fantasy, a sympathetic understanding of identity disorders emerges.

New logistical work-arounds sought to overcome the difficulties of physically congregating; each decision about tone could trigger dozens of questions. Are the problems we are experiencing self-contained within the pandemic, or perennial?

The curators ask in the program notes, Can remembrance fix a broken world? At the core of this inquiry into the world, and the status of the human within its historical, sociopolitical, technological, and ecological parameters, lies the emphasis on feeling.

It was a film for peers of mine whose burgeoning selfhoods hinged on things more consequential than cinephilia. But watching the film now, I am newly surprised by how grounded I feel in the everyday world it transcends.

There was a fair amount of expectation for this year’s Midnight selections to contain the next iteration of meaningful, shocking, or gossip-inspiring titles that could also be talked about as layered, complex examinations of real-world issues.

In their ambivalence and open-endedness, these films paradoxically brought me closer to a kind of emotional release than any other films in the festival, managing to capture our current state of uninterrupted dread and malaise in a way that feels comfortingly familiar.

This year there wasn’t as much awkwardness in the form of glitchy, poorly synced Zoom interviews, as one might have expected, though the same can’t be said for the sometimes verbose, overly grave ways that some filmmakers talked about their projects.

Our annual awards continued: Best Anti-Biopic, Best Actress, Best Pandemic Activity, Most Unexpected Heartthrob, Most Unexpected Revelations, Dear Film Comment, and more.

Reverse Shot's annual awards, including Best Godard Remix, Worst Idea, Best Ensemble, Most Numbing, The Thrill-Isn't-Gone Award, Best Structuring Absences, Best Old White Male, and more

From the vantage of our quarantined silos, we’ve had occasion to reflect upon how and where we gather, particularly in independent film circles, and whether they might stand for improvement.

The history of television political advertising sheds insights into why Trump’s dark rhetoric and outsider campaign strategy failed in 2020.

This is a series firmly situated in a fraught and flawed framing of the past. The core games play out against a backdrop that could easily have been lifted from a Western Civilization syllabus, and that is a foundational problem.

Days, Martin Eden, Time, I Was at Home, But..., Bacurau, Vitalina Varela, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Lovers Rock, First Cow, Malmkrog, To the Ends of the Earth