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

We have been publishing Reverse Shot for 15 years, and when it comes to maintaining our optimism and enthusiasm for the medium we all ostensibly love, we have had our ups and downs. But things feel hopeful as of late, both in terms of filmmaking and in film criticism.

Despite the infrastructure set in motion centuries ago to keep only whites in positions of power, Mudbound elegantly depicts how such ingrained racism only serves to aid whites in digging our own graves.

Three Billboards is the kind of momentary crowd-pleasing entertainment that will satiate audiences looking for the movie equivalent of a knee to the crotch—which not so incidentally is one of its defining images.

The Birds, Lake Mungo, Diabolique, Dead Ringers, Island of Lost Souls, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Martin

Made up of a series of mostly short scenes that combine into a slow bubbling up of existential terror, the film does build to an extended, if narratively abstract, climax, which is then summarily followed by a denouement that manages to conclude the story in a most willfully unsatisfying fashion, while being almost subliminal.

Cinema is always about duration, from the quickest cut to the longest, most open-ended camera rove. How much a filmmaker can contain in one passage is the essence of the medium, regardless of matters of length.

The disconnect between the liberated shooting and editing style and the social entrapment actually experienced by its characters gives The Florida Project its indeterminate feel and ungainly shape.

Aronofsky piles on incidents (rather than plot), bodies (rather than characters), until what once had the potential to be a pastoral paradise has become a writhing, grasping, cluttered Bosch-like abyss.

Self-consciously spare and reaching for a grandeur possibly too far beyond its frame, A Ghost Story is nevertheless a film of mesmerizing visual ideas and conceptual integrity.

As film critics, we have been unclear what to do with our despondency, other than one clear thing: direct our outrage away from suffocating social media channels and toward writing, reasoning, wrestling with ideas, praising, hoping, questioning.

How do the circumstances surrounding the Executive Order Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth echo the events of Pasolini’s dangerous masterpiece?

With the tone and care of the genuinely righteous, his voice was that of a herald, with writing that sliced through hypocrisy and the specific, tragic banality of American life with a swift condemnation that managed to touch the sublime.

Staying Vertical is an aggressively conceptual cycle-of-life saga that brings the director back to his earlier model, in which characters ramble through a freeform narrative with no fidelity to logic.

Films as disparate as Altered States, Nosferatu, 1984, The Night of the Hunter, Repulsion, Tetsuo the Iron Man, M, and Sette note in nero are placed on the same emotional plane, each an evocation of all-purpose, free-floating, indefinable anxiety.

If good art has to on some level be working against something then lately Jarmusch, with this film and Only Lovers Left Alive, seems to be valiantly fighting time and tide. In his ever gentle way, he has found a new urgency.

La Jetée, I Walked with a Zombie, Creepy, Jacob's Ladder, Young Sherlock Holmes, Vampyr, The Pit and the Pendulum

Directed with a rare combination of aesthetic vigor and emotional delicacy, this is a film that resonates in our culture and moment not because it was manufactured to matter, but because in its every breath it has clearly stayed true to itself.

One Sings may ultimately be gentle in its politics, but Varda could probably never make a truly mainstream film: her artistry is too exquisitely singular, too intrigued by moments out of time and the unspoken words between people that can only be expressed through abstraction.

In selecting the subject of our latest director symposium, we alighted upon a figure of constant surprise, of reinvention, of charm and oddity and intellectual freedom. She is one of the most thrillingly alive filmmakers working today, and she is 88.

There is nothing here that comes close to the subliminally effective terror of the original. Instead, Wingard expectedly goes for full-throttle, high-decibel horror, amping up the Blair Witch model for the ADHD generation, providing an endless array of false scares and loud crashes.