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

The type of succinct visual storytelling that marks Hollywood’s greatest output, from Sunrise to Vertigo to The Tree of Life, is not the purview of television; movies, however far we think they’ve fallen this week, exist in their own realm.

Despite Martin Scorsese propping it up with undying tenacity, John M. Stahl’s oft-touted 1945 "Technicolor noir," Leave Her to Heaven, still seems to languish on the peripheries of film history.

In its deft blending of tones and embedded cinephilic references, it maybe more closely resembles the supple, scary-funny early efforts of Steven Spielberg or Brian De Palma . . .

Antonioni’s film was lodged in my memory as an environmental dirge: billows of steam and smoke, ravaged landscapes, people dwarfed by machinery, a woman going mad amid the devastation. But a recent viewing brought back its essential ambiguousness.

Noise, Carrière 250 Meters, ¡Vivan las Antipodas!

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