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

There is no narration, no translation, and no explanation for the dense thicket of ritual gestures that we are peering into, each of which, one can intuit, has behind it an entire system of symbolic meanings.

What if we could see what is actually on the other side of the world from where we sit? . . . Russian documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky approaches these questions with a mixture of the digging child’s ingenuousness and the dogged explorer’s rigor and sense of purpose.

In Herzog’s 53-minute documentary on the Gulf War and its aftermath, the war begins and ends by the fourth minute.

Herzog rarely misses a chance to leap on canoes, wade through sludge, and handle native arrows. When he faces the camera and bares his zeal and fears, one glimpses a man capable of directing as well as starring in Moby Dick.

The camera is weapon and savior, mediator and patient observer, but it is never objective in Cameraperson, an extraordinary and singular filmmaking document by Kirsten Johnson that quietly lorded over everything I saw at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.

Movie of the Moment (for Worse), Best 3D, Best Failed Franchise Launch, Subprime Cinema Award, Most Metaphors, Worst Eating Habits, Paul Giamatti Award for Overacting, The Golden Torso Awards, and more!

With naked bodies slowly twisting and writhing in a thick, inky chiaroscuro, a hazy but unidirectional light giving definition only to the rounded forms and flexing musculature of the women onscreen, it is clear that Grandrieux has painting on his mind.

Kämmerer has, over ten years and as many films, established himself as one of Europe’s most exciting and formally economic young filmmakers.

"The film is never going to be transferred to digital. It always has to be shown as film, and it was constructed as a palindrome, so it could be shown from either end, and you can’t really do that with digital."

This mournful film takes the utopian aspiration of Communist dreams seriously, without overlooking the dangerous faults at their core.

"All the shots in my films are always the same, but they are different from one film to the other. In this film I did not want it to be too long. They are about fifteen seconds. It is the minimum. I cannot make this film with shots of less than fifteen seconds."

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Youth, Son of Saul, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Sicario, Goodnight Mommy, Mommy, The Overnight, The Tribe, Legend, Jenny’s Wedding

Often the idea of the avant-garde implies a somewhat detached, contemplative mode of viewing, and this aesthetic stance is kilometers away from Gagnon’s bailiwick. Of the North seems to invite rubbernecking more than any conventional audienceship.

In Jackson Heights, Carol, The Assassin, Clouds of Sils Maria, Timbuktu, Hard to Be a God, Arabian Nights, The Look of Silence, Eastern Boys, Horse Money