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

The Open Sky, The Cultivation of the Invisible Flower, Soul Searching

Touch of Evil contains a single-take tracking shot of such elegance and skill that it may one day come to be seen as the ultimate expression of Orson Welles’s filmmaking prowess. See if you can spot it—it appears 34 minutes into the film.

From the modernist glimmer of New York’s skyscrapers to the gray colorlessness of the crop-dusting sequence to the deep reflective properties of that suit (insert obligatory Mad Men reference), North by Northwest is Hitchcock’s fullest exploration of the silverness of the silver screen.

So rather than run down yet another list of "fearless" predictions about who will win the big prizes, we thought this year we'd pay tribute to our favorite past Oscar winners: you know, those movies that really make one appreciate the joy and magic of the Oscar season.

In Forty Guns, Stanwyck is on the way out of movie acting—the television box was more forgiving—fifty years old and not looking a day younger, a little stoat-like with her curled lips, the hardness of her wave just offset by the purr in her throat.

The very title of Leone’s 1966 picture—the final panel of the Man With No Name trilogy that made Clint Eastwood an international star—subverts the usually Manichean moral conventions of the Western.

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?