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

Reinstating Halloween from the nation’s living rooms to the big screen where it really belongs, gives audiences a clearer look at what makes a consummate frightener.

Coming to Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura today means having to strip away a great many preconceptions.

For a film so widely beloved, Singin’ in the Rain is truly mischievous, the ultimate expression of a genre that is more about spirit than cause-and-effect narrative relations.

In addition to being the most visually striking of Anderson’s six movies to date, There Will Be Blood might be the most visually striking American feature of the last decade. Or two, or three.

Studio head William Fox bet the farm on The Big Trail. It was one of only a handful of features shot on 70mm Grandeur film, a.k.a. Fox Grandeur, an early widescreen process which had only been in use for about a year.

The 1980s were rife with cinematic Trojan horses that proved more troubling and complex than their packaging, or pop cultural context, would indicate.

Within the strict temporal and location confines of Do the Right Thing lies a work concerned with tackling the biggest of American themes—race relations, ambition, urban survival, economics, violence, and liberty—on a microcosmic scale.

Rivette’s ordination of Journey to Italy as the first modern film is, in a philosophical sense, paradoxical, because in fact it is modernity itself which is being shunned, or at best broken down and humanized, by the film.

Bigger Than Life is a film filled with contradictions, paradoxes and confusions of emotion and reason; indeed, these are part of what makes it big and ugly and beautiful as life, even in its outsized proportions.

How massive the landscapes and castle chambers are in Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 epic, and how small the people in them seem.

Bring It On: SEE Guilty Pleasure
Disaster: SEE Parallels (Historical): post-9/11 anxiety.

Best New York Times Ratings Explanation Capsule Review, Best Time Spent Watching Paint Dry, Clunkiest Denouement, Most Unexpectedly Haunting, The Trying-Too-Hard Award, Discovery of the Year, Most Infantilizing Indie Rom-Com Award, and more

Ted, Prometheus, Michael, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Comedy, Bachelorette, The Hunger Games, Silver Linings Playbook, This Is 40, Anna Karenina, Ruby Sparks

The Deep Blue Sea, This Is Not a Film, The Kid with a Bike, Tabu, Holy Motors, The Master, Almayer’s Folly, The Turin Horse, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Lincoln