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

From our archives: writing on films that have been on our minds, featuring Ela Bittencourt, Ashley Clark, Michael Koresky, Joanne Kouyoumjian, Emma Piper-Burket, Jeff Reichert, Genevieve Yue, Farihah Zaman, and more.

There is that split-second of darkness. In the cinema, it comes between the last trailer and the film you came for. In the theater, just after the house lights dim completely. It is a feeling of being on the threshold of something unknowable.

On the surface, the four films are vastly different in both subject matter and approach, yet an unexpected sense of unity forms when they are viewed together.

In battling with paranoia and insomnia, and trying to make sense of the world, two writers go down separate wormholes—of an Australian faux-documentary horror movie and a Jacques Rivette tumble into conspiracy.

For this week's pair of writers, coping mechanisms including digging into the oeuvres of auteurs, from chronicler of the lonely American male Michael Mann to trailblazing Guadeloupean female filmmaker and activist Sarah Maldoror.

Young women are sick of the status quo in an unfairly forgotten American indie from the nineties and a classic bit of anarchy from the Czech New Wave of the sixties.

The subjects Skoog follows the closest end up on the fringes of group gatherings. As that world seems less stable, the implication looms that technology and industry irreparably threaten the land we still very much depend on.

On the delight of "unglamorous isolation," the revitalizing energy of two iconic movie stars, and the power of a great entrance.

Pia Hellenthal did not want Searching Eva to be slotted into one type of film, in the same way its subject seeks not to be pigeonholed into one identity.

Two writers connect over wildly disparate movies that nevertheless give each of them that wisful parental pull. Read about the mothers and fathers of Locke and Imitation of Life.

Doc Films did not just allow us to access film history; it allowed us to express, in however humble a fashion, our own place within it and within contemporary film culture, one that only lives as a social endeavor carried out and fulfilled in a collective space.

A roiling existential angst unites a high-concept comedy by Albert Brooks and a classic melodrama by Nicholas Ray.

For Eborn, the focus of Transnistra is more personal than political. “My work begins next to the character,” she said. “There’s a world around them that’s potent, it’s alive somehow. The inspiration comes from this person.”

Two strange musicals from the 1970s—featuring Catherine Deneuve and Donna Summer—help our writers find pleasure in the perverse.