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

A roiling existential angst unites a high-concept comedy by Albert Brooks and a classic melodrama by Nicholas Ray.

With hand sanitizer presence at venues and travelers carrying packs of alcohol wipes, we were aware that life was in the process of reconfiguring itself, but it didn’t quite seem real yet.

The crux of the story for Autumn is not her awakening to a varied feast of resources, but her ability to take control of her own self, an internalized conflict that only intensifies as she moves through Planned Parenthood.

She structures her films around dramatic temporal and spatial jumps, but without the backbone of conventional pacing they seem especially jarring; it often takes a minute to realize that Schanelec has shifted gears to a different world.

Carax envisions life as an endless state of unpredictable flux. We can’t help but transform depending on who we’re with and which spaces we enter, on-screen or off-. Taking escapism to its limit, it’s impossible to reconcile the “real” self with the “role.”

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"

Summer Hours is a film about the inevitability of movement—of time, of people, of industry—yet also the ways in which human nature strives to avoid long-term variation; how we try to smuggle poignancy into a seemingly inhospitable economic landscape.

The Invitation, The Ghost Train, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, A Scary Time, Messiah of Evil, Panna a netvor

Rather than charting the trajectories of her characters towards enlightened maturity, Hittman asks them to feel their way through the emotional dark, guided by impulse, rerouted and misdirected by social pressures.

Writer/director Jim McKay’s fifth feature, and his first since 2005’s Angel Rodriguez, is his most tightly plotted film yet, propelled by a momentum that’s often exhilaratingly fleet. Yet his emphasis on his characters’ everyday stakes keeps the film from feeling lightweight.

Spanning three visits to Chongqing over the course of one year, the film focuses on three of Shibati’s residents as they reckon with forced displacement and the dismantling of their homes and businesses.

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

A Gentle Creature is more of a destabilizing shock to the system than a call to arms, a confrontation with a broken state rather than a blueprint to rebuild it. It confirms Loznitsa as a master craftsman of the impeccably designed and crafted hellscape, politically charged and all-consuming.