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.

What Citizen Kane talks about is pretty much common currency everywhere now. The supremacy of the self, the squandering of talent, the exploitation of ignorance and fear, the abandonment of virtue. Welles himself lived all of this at the sharp end, while working in the film industry, from the release of Kane in 1941 until his death in 1985.

This seat at the top table is a privilege afforded to the very few, given that the stripped-back format of Menus-Plaisirs exists completely outside the grammatical norms of the ultra-popular, commoditized tabloid documentaries littering the top ten rubrics of our streaming services.

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

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, The Funhouse, Ginger Snaps, Frenzy, Maniac, Baby Blood, Possum

Watching these films again in 2022 reveals a poignant congruence with the deficiencies of the world today and prompts a deeper set of questions about humanity’s ability to govern itself.

Le Samouraï presents us not for the first time with a fully interiorized, “locked-in” Melville protagonist, but one whose loneliness and single-mindedness are mechanized and supercharged. This object explicitly demonstrates his corresponding ability to unlock, infiltrate, and destroy the lives of others.

The American West is a series of stories of belief and opportunity, drenched in violence. John Wayne said westerns were the only purely American art form. I sometimes think that maybe the movies themselves—the simple telling of stories on film for mass entertainment—are a purely American art form.

Pulse, Host, Brain Damage, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Velvet Vampire, Deathdream, The Devil and Daniel Webster

The need for the geometric sublimity of music leads two critics to two very different musical movie experiences.

Ozu used to say, “It is the films that watch us.” For Kiarostami, the work and its audience are one and the same: the artist expresses a vision and the audience captures and—by its plurality—multiplies it.

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"

She was 20 at the time of shooting, and her callowness is tangible and authentic throughout, but never once does Binoche take a backward step in her performance. Instead she drives the action forward, taking charge of the tempo.

Its beauty, innovation, and virtuosity aside, The Other Side of the Wind is not a neat epitaph because it contains more cynicism than Welles himself exhibited and more defensiveness than he should have ever needed to.

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

A brutal, but immaculately balanced and ultimately empathetic effect gives Hogg’s films an almost overwhelmingly tangible sentimentality. Her depiction of inexpressiveness is deeply expressive. Her silences are unbearable and beautiful at once.

In just 50 minutes, nooks and crannies of humanity are explored with a deftness and potency it would normally take a six-part TV series to uncover.

What has not changed, despite the shift into genre, is the commitment to helping us sympathize with damaged, alienating (and alienated) people. In his films we might feel the discomfort of self-recognition from these characters, while in all but the finest horror films, their predicament is usually reduced to a motive for a reign of bloody terror.

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

How soon after our heroine has been so viciously dispatched, turning our experience and emotions upside down, do we find ourselves itching for her body to disappear, even though this means her murderer will most likely escape justice? Just nine and a half minutes. Are we monsters?