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

Soderbergh achieves an effectively fraught air from the jump so that his scenes, even at their stillest, vibrate with the breath-seizing possibility of menace; we are continually and acutely aware that the domestic fracases and solitary activities depicted are being witnessed by eyes without a face.

Under the cover of blackout curtains, a woman jolts herself awake with a hair-raising shout. She catches her breath, but cannot shake off her ring of panic, the quiver and cold sweat of constant fear. This will be one of the more peaceful moments of her day.

In collaboration with Huppert, who has seldom appeared so playful and unguarded, he depicts Iris as supremely attentive and sympathetic to her students, while challenging them to dig deeper and shine a light on the thornier parts of themselves that they tend to keep buried.

The debut feature of writer-director India Donaldson pivots on a young woman’s realization that it is sometimes wisest to keep those we love at an arm’s length.

Last Summer is not so much a provocation or the immersion in perversion that those who know only of the logline and Breillat’s career might be led to believe. This is a master class in emotional precision.

On paper, these characters may sound primed for coarse caricature, these scenarios potentially played for broad laughs. But Avilés tunes her film to a minor key, elegantly and arrestingly whipping up a fine frenzy of mayhem, mundanities, merriment, and doom.

Older actors could have made these characters and their bond more emotionally resonant and credibly worn, marked by a sense of shared history and precious, always dwindling time.

Nashville demonstrated to me not only the unorthodox modes through which character can be communicated in narrative cinema but what a film character can rightfully be, how elision and opacity can captivate and secure an investment in characters about whom we ultimately know so little.

Anaita Wali Zada, a first-time actor who fled Afghanistan in 2021 with her sister after working for several years as a TV presenter and journalist, is often the lone subject of these images. Her composed, stoic face entrances just as it conceals a dull ache for something Donya struggles to name.

The films of Ira Sachs have balanced their slender narratives with richly resided-in evocations of people and milieus, surveying the uneasy and often breakable bonds between lovers, companions, and kin. But Passages is the first of his dramas whose leanness feels effectively and exhilaratingly taut.

This is a film about two people contemplating the possibilities of what could have been and what still might be, but it is also about the electric charge and covert forces that draw two bodies and souls together.

The raw material of the film is the daily, soul-sucking minutiae that comes with choosing and devoting oneself to the artist life in a country that cannot nor will not sustain such endeavors, rendering them ever more impractical without competitive grants, family money, or other such safety nets.

Their rage at the divisions and injustices of the world has only been amplified, but they have faltered at dramatizing how such divisions and injustices might color the more mundane, less sensational circumstances of those experiencing these crises first-hand.

Little Richard: I Am Everything, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, The Stroll, A Still Small Voice

Try as Kore-eda might, the questions the film raises cannot be fenced off from the global fight for reproductive justice, a battle from which this politically evasive film has been totally sequestered.

It retains the impassioned clarity of her style while enlisting its primary subject as its co-author. Nan Goldin provides illuminating, clarifying, and always candid commentary on the many chapters of her life in one-on-one interviews with Poitras, conducted on weekends during COVID.

Aftersun, the feature debut of the Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells, comes as close as any film I can recall to giving grief a cinematic form that does not seek to explicate but instead embody its very instability.

Lou and Sally’s bond feels not like a fated union between soulmates betrayed by time but a fleeting intersection of two souls on decisively separate paths. Atlantic City is the run-down playground where this meeting is made possible.

For me, there is one goal as an actor: truth. What is the truth in a situation? Because you are a reference to people. People are spending time to watch you, so you become their reference of a situation... if the audience is spending time watching you, there is a responsibility.

Fire of Love is a singular and sublime new documentary about a couple that risks the sentimental in order to realize the truly romantic.