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

For these characters, the past and the faraway become convenient displacements for their surrounding horrors. They ramble incoherently about Stalin and Putin, but they cannot seem to face their own regime—not even rhetorically.

By flattening her bitterness and vengeful desire into an ahistorical and essentialized feminine disposition, Gyllenhaal’s portrayal of Shelley at once diminishes the author’s stature in literary history and fails to address any of the documented ways in which she has been wronged.

The Zellners do not lean into such a crude comparison, yet it is hard not to read the dissolution of the cryptid community as an echo of the real-life devastation settler-colonialism has wrought on this continent’s peoples.

As a 2016 film about the 1950s studio system, Hail, Caesar! reminds us that Hollywood has always been a place of myth and self-congratulation, a dream factory that feigns progressiveness while serving national and hegemonic interests.