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

It’s never confirmed that the film’s “right” Chinaman is a statue whose head stands still and straight. Yet this remains all a matter of perception, as well as interpretation. The object is thus tactile yet vaguely defined, and leads to a larger question: if the Chinaman doesn’t belong here, then what, or who, does?

What does giving such primacy to the nonhuman and inanimate mean for the other elements onscreen, specifically the human or the animal? What does an object convey? What is its meaning within an art form that is itself so given to fears of impermanence?

Ghost Story of Yotsuya, Lord Shango, Malignant, Dracula, Carnival of Souls, Silent Night Deadly Night 3, When a Stranger Calls

I am left with the feeling that Many Saints is an expression of Chase’s archness run amok, rather than an invitation to immerse myself in a universe like that of The Sopranos, where, like our own, everyone feels put upon, can’t see past their pain, and therefore fail to notice the pain of others.

In this first, five-minute shot of his new film, Days, Tsai Ming-liang reminds us again of why this once youthful but eternally sorrowful man, now in his early fifties, is among the great muses of what we once called cinema.

Despite the brouhaha it caused upon its premiere, the film cannot and should not be reduced to the sensation around it. What’s most radical about it remains intact all these decades later: its aesthetic ambition and its willingness to plunge viewers into a conceptual gambit left completely up to us to decode.

A new Reverse Shot short film creatively documents the private Critical Interventions symposium hosted at Museum on the Moving Image just before the pandemic closed down the world.

Watching it again today, I realize that Zhang Yimou’s film might have worked particularly well for an adolescent viewer because it functions on traditional fairy tale logic.

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

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.

Superstar, by design, is not something you fondly recall; like Safe, it’s a film that uses a literal disease as cover for something less medically diagnosable—a social rot so deeply entrenched that there may be no cure.

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"