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

The intrepid writers from our Touching the Screen video game column have joined forces for Reverse Shot’s first-ever year-end games roundup.

While hardly the sole practitioner of deadpan cinematic whimsy, Kaurismaki can push his methods close to magical realism; his little stories about ordinary people swing tremendous emotional heft.

Each year, around 300,000 migrant laborers come to Huzhou, a major textile hub in eastern China, seeking jobs at 18,000 different small workshops. From 2014 to 2019, filmmaker Wang Bing embedded himself in the population there. By his reckoning, he and his crew shot 2,600 hours of footage.

The Holdovers feels less like a return to form than a retreat to safety. Its initial pretenses of unpleasantness mostly feel like winks at the audience.

If Breath of the Wild found new possibilities for player choice in exploration, Tears of the Kingdom offers enticing glimpses of what is to come as game designers rise to meet the challenge of endlessly creative audiences.

In a not-too-distant future Japan, Plan 75 is a government program which offers people over the age of 75 a token monetary incentive to accept euthanasia, suggesting it is their civic duty to cease burdening the country.

Brandon Cronenberg tends to confine transformation to the imaginary realm. For him, the body is but a plaything of the mind. This has produced some striking visuals, but they fail to linger, couched somewhat safely in their unreality.

The camera is frequently in motion, shifting elements like characters, animals, vehicles, and terrain in an intricate dance. Despite the impossibility of the otherworldly imagery, every shot feels like it comes from an actual camera perspective, which lends the film its verisimilitude.

With this film, Hong and company reflect on how, in middle age, they have willingly submitted themselves more to the potential of randomness in their art.

The titles forming this recent trend have diegetic time loops, ones built into their narratives and acknowledged by the characters.

Flux Gourmet favors a maximalist brand of satire, inflating mundane peccadilloes into epic proportions.

I have never had a shot in my digital movies which has gone on for more than seven or eight minutes at the most. It is important to use the medium and not let the medium use you.