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

Released in 1999, a year now fetishized as the last great flowering of the domestic cinema, American Movie encapsulates the shaggy, aspirational optimism of a quashed era, and one worthy of romantic remembrance.

So often in writing on experimental cinema (to say nothing of art in general) one is confronted with polarities of intuition and concept, emotion and intellect, feeling and form. Williams’s film demonstrates that while such distinctions may be legitimate, they need not be reified into strict dualisms.

Part 2 of a special conversation on games and art featuring Destiny 2, Final Fantasy, Hitman, Tower of Druaga, Pathologic 2, and more.

In this special conversation for Touching the Screen, five critics discuss potential angles from which to approach video games as art.

If Breath of the Wild found new possibilities for player choice in exploration, Tears of the Kingdom offers enticing glimpses of what is to come as game designers rise to meet the challenge of endlessly creative audiences.

Fox remains underappreciated, even though his name is universally known. Fox is perhaps the sitcom performer who most successfully translated his innocent ebullience and endearing kineticism from television to film.

Museum of the Moving Image film curators Eric Hynes and Edo Choi continue their chat about Cannes 2023, including comments on Killers of the Flower Moon, May December, Anatomy of a Fall, The Pot au Feu, and more.

For the second year in a row, MoMI’s film curators visited the Cannes Film Festival together. Hynes and Choi pass notes in the hall between screenings, discussing the culture of and around the festival, and, yes, the occasional film.

Paying attention to minor characters constitutes not just an act of care for them but a whole difference in epistemology. This insight is core to Jill, Uncredited, a 17-minute short directed by Anthony Ing that splices together scenes of 78 films featuring background actor Jill Goldston from her half-century-long career.

Does folklore come to us or react to what we give it? Mami Wata, C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s third feature and the first by a Nigerian filmmaker to premiere at Sundance, is principally concerned with the meaning and scope of the stories we pass to each other.

The River Is Not a Border retraces the events of 1989 with an attentive but unobtrusive hand. Diago casts his participants not just as subjects but as storytellers, resulting in a film guided more by memory and feeling than historical fact or cinematic flair.

When Julia is alone and physically grounded on the Earth rather than speeding down the highway, Quivoron examines her queer performance. Rodeo is at its most mesmerizing when Julia’s hair isn’t whipping in the wind.

Jeanne Dielman asserts the importance of its subject while also asking us to reconsider what we look for in—and how we look at—a movie. We inhabit what feels like a simulation of real time, confined except for the occasional errand, to the interior of 23 quai du Commerce.

The focus on the packaging and commodification of these plants and vegetables demystifies the agrestal fantasy of so many of our products. At first numbing, Ortín’s images of rote mechanical production begin accruing a subtlesense of dread, appearing as an unbroken and uncaring process.