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

Eschewing the use of talking heads or a slate of statistics, director Geeta Gandbhir reconstructs the narrative largely from police bodycam footage—arguably the true crime idiom of the 2020s, taking the premise of Cops (1989–present) to its optimized conclusion: law enforcement is the camera crew.

There is this diffusion to the image projected on the glass. The glass has this inherent texture, and the way color looks on it is not natural… it’s not quite like Technicolor, maybe more like two-strip Technicolor, or even some early hand-colored things.

Released in 1999, a year now fetishized as the last great flowering of the domestic cinema, American Movie encapsulates the shaggy, aspirational optimism of a quashed era, and one worthy of romantic remembrance.