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

If there is a recurring theme in the trilogy, it is the entitled craving for stardom. This is as true of Maxine as it was for Pearl. In that previous film this was repeated like a mantra (the film’s worst quality). Here, it’s even more cumbersome.

The technical bombast retains its power, but the extended cut is concerned with more emotional matters. In the early, banal behavior of the working-stiff crew, in their interactions and the unsaid meanings behind innocuous utterances and the contradictory, incongruous interactions of lapsed lovers, there is authenticity.

Dial has five credited writers and cost 300 million, yet the film plays it safe, which is the worst thing a big budget film can do. It is, as is usually the case these days, an impersonal, idling piece of intellectual property.

Fox remains underappreciated, even though his name is universally known. Fox is perhaps the sitcom performer who most successfully translated his innocent ebullience and endearing kineticism from television to film.

The ghost of Bogart hovers over two films from the 1970s that are screening in the Snubbed series, selections that exemplify the Academy’s indifference to unlikable antiheroes adrift in diffuse underworlds.

Translating Poe to a visual medium is an inherently tricky endeavor: though the plots of his stories lend themselves to film, the everlasting poignancy of his work is his deft use of language to conjure moods of ominous ineffability.

Formally, Pearl is his most elegant film, with careful, considered, yet modest compositions and smooth camera movements. West and regular DP Eliot Rockett use the whole wide frame, placing Pearl in the periphery of many shots with the farm consuming the rest, the countryside like a romantic painting spread over the background.

You can feel the sense of chaos in the cacophonous trains festooned with graffiti, bulbous fonts and enigmatic emblems and cartoonish signatures. Kirchheimer distills the essence of the city into 45 minutes of trains trundling along, piebald in paint; the film is a beguiling sequence of 16mm images.

X is a sinister, salacious slasher that is unencumbered by pretensions, a film flensed of fat (and flesh), concerned with grisly gory fun and giving us people getting stabbed and shot and eaten by alligators.

Cover Girl, by Brooklyn-based artist Sara Cwynar, is a shimmering assemblage of images and items, images of items, objects, colors, and shapes, accompanied by a loquacious yet lethargic voiceover that intones indolently on and on until it becomes something like white noise.

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

His films can be quite melancholy, as this one is, but they often, especially his more recent ones, vibrate with giddiness, the ever-alert camera finding the right, often idiosyncratic angle; Shyamalan still believes, with the resoluteness of a child, that movies are magic, even if they are for adults.

The film conjures a world that feels appropriately familiar yet somehow strange, with seemingly arbitrary details, the collapsing of years and collating of moments, the consequences of the future leaking back into the past.

Her film understands the anxiety of trust, the pain of vulnerability, and makes literal the smothering feeling of being trapped in a Sisyphean cycle with a toxic friend.

In his five films, Perry has exclusively written irredeemably selfish characters, who opt to remain in their own comfort zones, yet he sustains a consistent empathy, never dismissing or torturing them. There is a Sisyphean desperation to their yearnings.

The current President, and former self-professed law-and-order candidate, seems to take his cues from the New York seventies vigilantism of Death Wish, as evidenced by his Executive Order on a Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety.

Evolution is a serene film, one that exists in a state of twilight sedation, but beneath the surface something stirs, like the percolating uncertainty of a boy stricken with fever and confined to his bed.