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

"A radically new way to watch story and interact with story" conceals the true subversion out there.

Pulse, Host, Brain Damage, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Velvet Vampire, Deathdream, The Devil and Daniel Webster

The American Gothic, particularly as practiced by literary forebears Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving, tends to orbit around concepts of evil, madness, and the supernatural. But ultimately no monster ever compares to humans driven by fear.

The drive-in is inextricable from the history of censorship in big-budget American cinema, and is also inextricable from the history of the automobile in the U.S., which is in turn inextricable from the history of suburbanization.

The drive-in would become, in the postwar period, a symbol of untethered, ever-expanding, pedal-to-the-medal America, both a communal living room for Baby Boom parents and a prowling ground for teenagers.

Contemporary political realities leaving our most vulnerable citizens in the dust inspires two writers recall the work of great filmmakers from Senegal and Japan.

Both parties are prepared for today’s advertising landscape because of the shifts in party organization and campaign strategy that began almost seventy years ago.

A documentary about the 9to5 women's movement and an unsung Linklater drama paint an urgent portrait.

We’re trying out something new this week, and switching to Wednesdays. Same time: 5:00pm. Now you can use Reverse Shot to help you get over the midweek hump! Next week, we are pleased to welcome The Criterion Collection's Andrew Chan and Metrograph's Aliza Ma.

Amidst isolation and precautionary measures, this week's paired-up writers find momentary solace—if not true escape—in the worlds of confounded men trying to get away from it all.

A 1959 postapocalyptic melodrama with Harry Belafonte and a recent domestic portrait set in 1960 have this week’s pair of writers thinking about displacement in America.

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This is a contemporary American hellscape, but if Chaplin and Tati were socially aloof within environments of cold modernity, O’Malley’s outcasts can barely communicate as they navigate a world corroded by mediation.

“Documentary, through its earliest forms, is a colonial concept. The white man appears and then because he is the master, he unveils the story the way he sees it. He literally becomes the seer,” says filmmaker Marjan Safinia.