By Natalia Keogan | March 14, 2025
First Look 2025

Despite its anxious and melancholic air, When the Phone Rang also captures the golden haze of youth, with its moments of whimsy and wonder . . . not even a raging war can compare, at times, to the monumental mortification of pubescence.

His films occlude the presence of human labor and consumption. Instead, he spotlights the empty, spaceship-like labs and warehouses where meat of all kinds is processed or artificially created before it is packaged by automated robots and sent off to supermarkets.

By Savina Petkova | March 14, 2025
First Look 2025

Windless is rigorously pictorial with centrally composed shots and the linear perspective of Renaissance art, where the relative size, shape, and position of objects is organized around imagined lines converging at a point on the horizon. But even though the film upholds those conventions, it also makes room for the character to resist or break them.

By Chloe Lizotte | March 13, 2025
First Look 2025

When compressed to a dry-sounding logline, The Shipwrecked Triptych is an anthology film about postwar German cultural identity and social exclusion; Eroglu is Danish-Turkish and was educated in Berlin, which frames his perspective on the country. But the film is not a history lesson.

By Jordan Cronk | February 28, 2025
Text of Light

No Other Land is a film situated at ground level, depicting innocent people literally fighting to protect not only their homes but also their entire way of being. Three other films from last year took a bird’s eye view to similar subject matter.

By Jawni Han | February 14, 2025
Queer Radicals

Revolutionary gestures in cinema have to be excavated from the rubble of film history, and an earnest engagement with this deeply flawed film unveils a reservoir of untapped revelations that can be harnessed in our contemporary queer imagination.

January 28, 2025
Years in Review

Reverse Shot's annual awards and accolades, including Greatest Collaboration, Biggest Leap of Faith, Best Supporting Actress and Actor, Most Tasteless Song(s), Saddest Streamer, Best Sound Effect, Biggest Ball Drop, Most Ghoulish Grin, and much more!

January 17, 2025
Years in Review

Nickel Boys, Janet Planet, Hard Truths, Dahomey, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Juror #2, Evil Does Not Exist, The Beast, All We Imagine as Light, I Saw the TV Glow

By Dan Schindel | January 3, 2025
At the Museum

The rise of affordable filmmaking tools, the internet, smartphones, and social media platforms have led to many words written in the 21st century about the broadening power to create and distribute cinema. In parallel, there has been a related but less-discussed rise in the essay film.

The way we see a game—whether we can control the camera or not, whether the frame moves or is static, how the frame moves—is an artistic quality as important as (and often interlocked with) its interface, its methods of immersion...

Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Mask, Arrebato, The Stuff, Cuadecuc, vampir, Tall Shadows of the Wind, Drag Me to Hell.

By Kelli Weston | October 30, 2024
This Must Be the Place

Although shot in 2000, Frailty heralds themes that would trouble the coming era (and its cinema): Christofascist warfare, “cleansing” the region of unsavory figures, the son split between patriarchal fidelity and his own scruples.

By Asha Phelps | September 26, 2024
At the Museum

Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. The story of the Jordan family being forced by harsh economic realities to give up the farm they''d worked for decades is a poignant and beautiful epic in miniature.

By Vikram Murthi | September 19, 2024
First Look 2024

The Featherweight actively engages with core ideas behind direct cinema and verité, residing in a blurry middle ground between the two genres, that is between minimizing a documentarian’s presence and actively participating in the action.