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

It is the very aridity of its emotional content, parched to desert-of-the-real levels by de-aging effects that render Hanks and Wright (and several of their co-stars) as weirdly artificial and subject to illusionistic manipulation as their environment, that is so startling—and, for the most part, beguiling.

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

There is nothing new under the sun in the films of Alice Rohrwacher, which pay their respects to the beauty and mystery of older civilizations while suggesting that exploitation—of people, and of physical and spiritual resources— is almost as ancient as the world itself.

That the output of Fessenden over four decades has been taken for granted is one thing, but it is more like his being taken for granted has itself been taken for granted, as grimly self-fulfilling as any dark prophecy about pentagrams and the need to stay off the moors.

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

Glazer crafts clammily immaculate surfaces that belie ripples of feeling, and so it seemed worth plunging back into Birth’s murky depths to explore the possibility of some new—or previously ignored—undertow.

This hybrid courtroom drama-slash-psychological thriller is so conducive for both chin-stroking critical contemplation and a certain (highly rarefied) form of crowd-pleasing that it could just as easily have been engineered in a lab as crafted as a work of art.

Enys Men feels as stubborn and solid as the stone monolith perched at the edge of its desolate setting; the cinematic equivalent of a modest yet immovable object, an impassive and ruggedly beautiful site of contemplation.

The film has been constructed in a way that puts the dual onuses of perception and interpretation onto the audience. It is a heavy burden that is also hard to process when you’re being slammed around so forcefully.

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

Given a pair of warm bodies and a bed to work with, Denis is peerless at choreographing physical intimacy . . As long as things are more or less transactional, Trish and Daniel hold our attention, but the slow-burning love story is harder to swallow.

The baseline conceit of the actor as a ruthless authority figure derives from Blake and those brass balls, and how they wordlessly externalize the tumescent cockiness of their owner.

Ghost Story of Yotsuya, Lord Shango, Malignant, Dracula, Carnival of Souls, Silent Night Deadly Night 3, When a Stranger Calls

Circularity, stasis, and a certain, refined sense of stagnation as a state of tarnished grace: all are very much a facet of his aesthetic and sensibility, with characters trapped in variably self-insulating and self-destructive loops of passivity, inaction, and age-inappropriate behavior.

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.

The theme of honor among thieves, and its embedded suggestion that outlaw principles are a form of resistance in a fundamentally lopsided society, is fulfilled at epic length in the new Jia Zhangke crime drama Ash Is Purest White.

While there are many aspects binding Transit to Barbara and Phoenix (including an oppressive system, embodied here by the vagaries of international migration in wartime), Petzold is working in a slightly different register; it is at once more rigorously conceptual and less sociopolitically specific than its predecessors.

I have never really registered the supposed mastery of the post-Unforgiven Eastwood movies, and found The Mule alternately flat and slapdash, more carefully shaped conceptually than on the level of composition or editing.

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