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

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

I think that on the surface, the story follows the small mysteries of everyday life. But it doesn’t stop there; it goes beyond that and expands to deal with some bigger mysteries about the world we live in.

The super-fan has progressed to secretary, then understudy, then professional and romantic usurper. Six years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, All About Eve tapped a rich vein of existential panic tied to the theme of replication and replaceability.

Even the most resourceful, imaginative filmmaker would be hard-pressed to redeem the screenplay, specifically the lengths to which Cody goes to disguise the true nature of the story, and also the underlying reasons for the charade, which are unconvincing and in bad faith.

If one of the principal powers and pleasures of cinema is its ability to momentarily suspend thoughts or cares about what lies outside the frame, then Zama can be taken an object lesson in manipulation. Every strenuously controlled moment and movement constitutes an irresistible entreaty to simply go blank and watch.

Guadagnino and screenwriter James Ivory have produced a film that simultaneously analyzes and dramatizes issues of sexuality, religious identity, and, once again, privilege and yet without straining against its clearly marked narrative boundaries.

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

Amirpour seems to have placed herself in a cozily indulgent trance, mesmerized by the possibilities of deluxe, corporately subsidized cult filmmaking.