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

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

Fanny and Alexander is a celebration of the act of looking, in all its power to invent, animate, and destroy; it goes so far as to suggest that the things seen owe their qualities, their presence, even their existence to the seer.

The world in Suspiria is so threatening and unstable that colors glow with sinister intensity, the camera moves as if possessed, and natural sounds abruptly give way to jangly music—and that’s just the first minute or so.

Death is here something to be profoundly feared, something that can’t be quantified; the ghostly realm exists not as a concept but as a reality and an end point.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Innkeepers, The Vanishing, The Seventh Victim, Lips of Blood, Repulsion, Insidious

The Thing is not just an unnerving title: by its nature, the enemy, a corrosive alien organism which kills and replicates its prey, has no distinct face or personality of its own—a “conquer and survive” motivation is initially ascribed to it, but it defies any description.

Monument Film sculpture, anders, Molussien (differently, Molussia), Phantoms of a Libertine, Audition, When Faces Touch, Collections, Martina’s Playhouse, From Romance to Ritual, Spying, Confidential Pt. 2, The Extravagant Shadows

What if the old saying “You can’t go home again” has it backwards? What if we’re invisibly bar-coded to our point of origin, and we’re just spinning our wheels on the map when we try to leave, failing to shed the place we came from?

The way in which Lynch handles that severed ear offers a crucial hint as to how Blue Velvet simultaneously establishes these parallel worlds and destabilizes the boundaries between them.

The couch doesn’t match her house, which is to say it doesn’t match her: pale, delicate, and self-effacing to the point that she practically disappears into the drapery.

A “free adaptation” of Petronius’s fragmented-by-the-ravages-of-time, first-century mock epic, Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) is filled with constant, unexpected laughter.

One of the many remarkable things about Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo is the way it lulls you into believing you’re just watching an ordinary western. For an unlucky few, this sensation might even remain intact right until the end, but chances are that something in the film will break the spell.

If cinema is a dream, Vertigo is its nightmare.