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

Maybe rigorous analysis needs always to be leavened with a certain degree of humility. This seems particularly important when we look at films from unfamiliar places and wish to address ideas of culture and place.

“Will haunt you after it’s over . . . makes us think about the role that food plays in our lives—both as social beings and creatures of the earth.” –Vox

Pulse, Host, Brain Damage, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Velvet Vampire, Deathdream, The Devil and Daniel Webster

His movies are about fraught relationships and breakdowns in communication, but without any histrionics; they often fracture time and chronology, but not in a cloying or self-consciously experimental way. They are so emotionally transparent that they run the risk of being mistaken for simple-minded.

The chaos of the moment feels aptly reflected and deeply felt in both a Bogdanovich slapstick classic from the seventies and a Hammer horrror gem from the sixties.

This column will not simply be about great films we saw in theaters, but about films on which are imprinted the mental traces of the past, of the ineffable experiences of seeing them at a certain point in our personal histories.

In this ongoing column, one writer will send another a new piece of writing about a film they have been watching and pondering over, in the hopes that this will prompt a connection to a different film the other has been watching.

Malick’s filmmaking, especially here and in everything after, strikes me as a way of using the cinematic form to piece together a visual approximation of a world made unknowable by our own perceptions, our own human limitations.

No matter how much things change, movie love remains; it is always regenerating, refreshing, being passed down to new lovers.

With its air of weariness and melancholy, its shadowy interiors and images of doleful professionals going through their motions, Clemency is a sepulchral film, but Chukwu never allows for an air of distanced or rehearsed affectation.

Seeking historical and temporal specificity ultimately proves fruitless, and provocatively so: The Irishman is, after all, based on an account of a subjective reality, an exactingly detailed version of one man’s perception of history, and of himself.

Unfriended: Dark Web, Penda's Fen, The Collector, Someone's Watching Me, The Queen of Spades, Angst, Amazing Stories: "Go to the Head of the Class"

She has continually brought to her roles intense dedication, as well as a methodical approach to neuroses that can toggle between effortless and effortful; some can find her showmanship off-putting, while some of us are captivated in a purely pleasurable way.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is overcast with melancholy and fueled by a rueful self-determination to overcome it. It’s on the surface his simplest film, but somehow his trickiest to talk about.

Because her performance is so often located in reaction shots, and because she can charge even the smallest glance with a history of conflicted feelings, Binoche makes what might have otherwise been a rote audience double into a rich repository for all the film’s inquiries.

Peele unleashes a bevy of conceptual ideas about race, class, and American-ness that are only difficult to grasp if the viewer is not really looking. Us is supremely confident filmmaking, a thrill ride shot through with existential urgency.

3 Faces is the most freeform and expansive of the cycle of movies that has come to define the latter part of his filmography, and, crucially, it is the film that brings him back to the feminist concerns that fueled so many of his definitive earlier works.

Sorry Angel, by design, chronicles a decade of death and uncertainty yet is more driven by the emotional specificity of queer love, laying bare its conundrums without any pretensions to universalization.

Life exquisitely pours forth out of If Beale Street Could Talk, a film that seems to move on unceasing currents of emotion, of love and pain, of big heartaches and small joys, of revelations and disillusionments.

In telling her tale of the eternally disenfranchised, Rohrwacher defies standards of storytelling, character, and even time itself.