Features
The audience sees engine-rendered vistas shot like B-roll, in-game interviews with players staged as talking heads, the physical limitations and cinematographic mores of real-life filmmaking transposed onto the lightweight, untethered physics of a video game.
Touching the Screen
Reverse Shot’s first-ever year-end games roundup.
Our imaginations forge our borders as surely as our borders forge us. Virginia Woolf demanded a room of her own, but Charlotte Brontë's lady in the attic might've had something altogether different to say about that. For ultimately we are the ones who affix meaning to place.
Love Machina, Desire Lines, Sebastian, Bold Eagle, Stress Positions, I Saw the TV Glow
My Old Ass, Good One, How to Have Sex, Essex Girls, Suncoast
Years in Review
Reverse Shot's annual awards and accolades, including Biggest Small Movie, Smallest Big Movie, Most Deflating Trend, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Goulash, Best Reality Break, Best Scene-Stealer, Most Myopic Biopic, Best Comeback Comedy, and more!
Lyrical turnarounds like “Drive boy dive boy / Dirty numb angel boy / In the doorway boy / She was a lipstick boy”—in this surreal context, the sounds of human confusion are not so far away from how a glitching machine might speak. Homer’s version, a synthetic soliloquy.
Many of the best and most radical films came from major auteurs experimenting with new forms, whether that is Hong Sang-soo, Pedro Costa, or Wang Bing. Plus: Lois Patiño, James Benning, Deborah Stratman, Steve McQueen, Eduardo Williams, Joshua Gen Solondz, and more.
Years in Review
May December, Killers of the Flower Moon, Showing Up, Our Body, Fallen Leaves, Trenque Lauquen, Asteroid City, All of Us Strangers, Pacifiction, The Zone of Interest, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
It is only through environmental context that its sparse narrative reveals itself, and even then the game is content to leave things unexplained by its wild, cosmic ending.
Roy Andersson's film captures the planning, action, and aftermath of a mass protest against a planned Davis Cup tennis match in Sweden against Rhodesia. It is a vivid record of 1960s political protest and of a wealthy European nation’s racism.
This is a game explicitly about narrative, adaptation, and the multifaceted nature of games as a medium. The game was produced by Remedy, a studio now blessed with not only the budget to fully realize their vision but also implicit permission to experiment from a gaming public weary of copy-paste open world games.
Unlike the moving-image installations presented as part of group exhibitions like documenta and the Venice Biennale, Villa Medici focuses squarely on the theatrical presentation of its selection—which, considering the Renaissance-era backdrop, makes for some surreal viewing environments.
Haynes is doing something extraordinarily delicate and difficult in May December, reminding viewers, with the lightest of touches, that we are all implicated and indulgent in the processes of social, cultural, and sexual exploitation that define the modern consciousness.