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

Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Mask, Arrebato, The Stuff, Cuadecuc, vampir, Tall Shadows of the Wind, Drag Me to Hell.

Idiocracy, kept relevant in part due to think pieces and adoptions of aspects of its worldview by both sensitive liberals and the “based” right, has never strayed far from my mind. I thought it’d be worth questioning the qualified endorsement I gave this seeming underdog and victim of 20th Century Fox’s release mismanagement.

The Haunting, Cat People, Possibly in Michigan, The City of the Dead, Dragonwyck, The Eternal Daughter, Ghostwatch.

Here, cannibalism rather than vampirism is the favored protean allegory for outcast rootlessness, codependency, hormonal youthful yearning, and antsy wanderlust. Mostly it is about not belonging, with cannibalism stepping in for commoner differences.

The older film is often classified as a noir (even though it is lacking some of the tropes and visual signifiers of that pseudo-genre), which del Toro has taken as an excuse to stuff his version with constant cigarette smoking and monsoon-like rainfall in his usual literal and immoderate fashion.

The narrative remains a storytelling marvel in the way it centers an object to both push the action along and toggle between characters while sneakily establishing the greater themes of unstable justice-lust and moral rot.

A documentary about the 9to5 women's movement and an unsung Linklater drama paint an urgent portrait.

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"

While it is Stephen’s miserable head that the viewer largely inhabits, Anna is the source of the film’s mysteries, and it’s essential that an actor with Binoche’s talent is at hand to rescue the role from its potential as generic raven-haired temptress.

It is a blessing that the 78-year-old continues to forego retirement, even if it means his films end up unceremoniously dumped to VOD, as was the case with the dazzling and mischievous Passion and now Domino, his surveillance-state European crime thriller.

It plays like a career recap of his greatest hits, sprinkled with new heroes, villains, random aged inserts of wholesome 1950s Americana or crumbling infrastructure, and freshly updated ironic soundtrack cues.

There is a formal adventurousness here typical of Kurosawa, who has seesawed between genres both throughout his career (horror, sci-fi, and dramas like Tokyo Sonata) and within individual films (Doppelganger transitions from a loss-of-identity thriller to a sort of satirical romance). The constant element is a sure-footed aesthetic precision.

An occasional tin ear for old-guy dialogue suggests Linklater might still be more comfortable with the casual-philosophical badinage of those a decade or more his junior, but the 12-year gestation gives the film the distance crucial to its angry, sad, but, in hindsight, wise perspective on the early Iraq War years.

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

Free Fire is often reminiscent of the cash-in Tarantino-esque titles that invaded video stores after Pulp Fiction, time capsules like 2 Days in the Valley, City of Industry, or 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, rather than being a new or exciting thing of its own.

There is high public interest in stand-up comedy, evidenced by the popularity of Louie, The Aristocrats . . . the ability of comics like Hannibal Buress and Amy Schumer to make headlines and the preponderance of specials on streaming services like Netflix. But the subject has been a hard nut for narrative features to crack.

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

Though hearing about the death of a man from exposure to the elements provided Varda an initial spark, it soon turned into a story of the specific snares of a female vagabond experience, and by extension the female experience.

Concussion hits the league surprisingly hard, actually; you don’t exit with a rosy view of the deceptive mega-corporation . . . If anything is soft in Concussion, it is the storytelling and conventionalism of the filmmaking.

The Witch, The Hound of the Baskervilles, In the Mouth of Madness/Hair, Ringu, The Visit, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Carrie