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

Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Mask, Arrebato, The Stuff, Cuadecuc, vampir, Tall Shadows of the Wind, Drag Me to Hell.

Shot on 35mm in shades of ominous gray by cinematographer Lol Crawley in the mid-century VistaVision format, the film is so gripping moment to moment that it’s almost convincing in its determination to be a definitive American epic.

It is a narrative of clear-cut boundaries and simple symmetries, but within them it contains galaxies of emotion; Haigh has found the precise outlines in which to color in a meditation on the strange, liminal experience of gay male existence.

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.

The anxiety of influence is real for a critic: no matter how confident we may be in our opinions and discursive and fair in our aims, we are, like those in any other field, not immune from the methodological skepticism our peers sow in us.

The Haunting, Cat People, Possibly in Michigan, The City of the Dead, Dragonwyck, The Eternal Daughter, Ghostwatch.

Scorsese shows how the brutality of American history begins on the smallest scale, that the human capability for deception and self-justification breeds epochal, even genocidal shifts—microcosmic expressions of large-scale historical atrocity.

We asked our contributors to select a film they have written about in some form in the past. It could have been a review, a term paper, a passionate email, or a Post-it note. The writer may disagree with what they wrote, or they may stand by it. Nevertheless, they are now a different person, and we wanted to know about their personal journey with this particular film.

Oppenheimer, with its achronological historical narrative, crosscuts among different time frames, and though it has just one inevitable outcome (the annihilation of humanity), its biopic structure gives it an inherent tidiness it is constantly working against.

Mungiu maintains his penchant for slow-building narrative tension, gradually revealing dramatic stakes, yet rather than focus exclusively on one or two characters clearly wending their way through an economically dramatized moral dilemma, he takes a more panoramic approach.

Beau Is Afraid is inherently contradictory: confident, muscular cinema about emotional atrophy and living with profound insecurity. I sat down with Ari in a bustling East Village cafe, where, over the sounds of clanging coffee filters and hissing steamers, we discussed his latest film, beloved inspirations, and the terror of putting things out in the world.

I cannot imagine seeing something more compositionally thought-through and artfully constructed in the current cinema, or something that more compellingly refuses to divulge its secrets while also maintaining a constant engagement with so many legible ideas.

For most of its running time, Babylon barrels past any possibility of wistful reverie, content to wallow in excess and sin, only to devolve in its final third into meditations on the power and beauty of the image.

Though this is perhaps the ultimate Spielberg film, it does not move or feel like one. He is going for something else: a thoughtfully unshowy aesthetic that heightens one’s awareness of being a viewer. Watching, we’re rarely thinking about what the camera is doing, but rather what it is showing and why.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, The Funhouse, Ginger Snaps, Frenzy, Maniac, Baby Blood, Possum

Sara Driver’s film feels more beholden to the work of Maya Deren and Jean Cocteau than the coming wave of American independent movies that would transform the decade.

Cinematically it is neither here nor there, sandwiched between agreed-upon renaissances. There were marvels, there were duds, there were mediocrities, like any year... Yet we discovered 1981 feels as much like a turning point as it does a middling cinematic interzone.

Even after his string of fictionalized autobiographical films, Davies featured surrogates whose experiences allow him to come to terms (philosophical, aesthetic, moral, sexual, always personal) with a world that has too often betrayed, disappointed, and made shame out of beauty.

Noe uses two cameras to capture all of their travails in intimate close-up, allowing us to see them both at once using split-screen. Such a formally rigorous approach tends to call attention to itself, naturally inviting questions of aesthetics and perception.

Defining (and redefining) contemporary fascism may be a losing game, but identifying the destructive forces of moral conservatism remains as depressingly easy as ever. Another thing that remains vivid: the misogyny at the corrupt core of modern patriarchal life.