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

Most Underrated Overrated Film, Worst Homage,Worst Ending to a Good Movie/Best Ending to a Bad Movie, Worst Cosmic Meditation, Best Establishing Shots, Best Boy Crashing the Girls Club, and more

Shame, We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Horrible Bosses, Drive, In a Better World, Sarah’s Key, My Week with Marilyn, No Strings Attached/Friends with Benefits, Sleeping Beauty, The Iron Lady

The Tree of Life, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Certified Copy, Nostalgia for the Light, Meek’s Cutoff, Mysteries of Lisbon, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Take Shelter, The Arbor, Historias extraordinarias

Barry Lyndon, an 18th-century picaresque adapted from a 19th-century novel by William Thackeray, certainly does have a painterly quality to it. It is static and studied, to the point that it often feels as though it were less made of moving images than a series of tableaux frozen in time.

Ophuls’s is a cinema of elegant, precise camera movement, where tracking shots reveal and negotiate complex chronologies and social hierarchies, particularly as they relate to questions of gender and femininity.

Everyone seems to understand the basic concept about Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Jake La Motta: that it’s a sports picture blown up into tragic opera, a film about a small (and often, as depicted, small-minded) person who somehow attains mythic grandeur.

With its sweeping views of Tara and its still-shocking mass of injured soldiers horrifically piled up in an Atlanta square, Gone with the Wind is big in a literal sense. But the film is also remarkably intimate, allowing seemingly small things to come into focus as they are thrown against the relentless march of history.

How are movies meant to be watched? The question inevitably, frustratingly, then raises a second question: What is a movie?

Fabrice Gobert’s Lights Out, Antony Cordier’s Happy Few, Florin Serban’s If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle

Paz Fábrega’s The Cold Water of the Sea, Anahi Berner's It’s Your Fault, Carlos César Arbeláez's The Colors of the Mountain

You’ve seen a movie inspired by Lawrence of Arabia, no doubt. You may well have seen a movie that parodies it, a sincere form of cinematic flattery. You’ve certainly seen bits and pieces replayed in every Academy Awards montage. But if you haven’t seen Lawrence on the big screen, then you just haven’t seen it all.

Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats, Bernard Rose’s Mr. Nice, Duane Baughman and Johnny O’Hara's Bhutto

Michael Brandt’s The Double, Leila Kilani’s On the Edge, Ahmed el-Maânouni’s Oh the Days!, Leonard Retel Helmrich’s Position Among the Stars

The first clue is in the title. Not in its meaning exactly, but in the fact that when Jacques Tati’s 1967 cri de coeur, three painful years in the making, was finally released in French cinemas, the title was in English. Gasp!