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

Transporting the viewer into a country setting where a unique way of life is gradually disappearing, Boone comes with no expository voiceover, respects no dramaturgy, and excludes any interaction between filmmaker and subjects.

Appreciated from a perspective of sixteen years, the film now seems to fit perfectly in the moment of its making, but still feels as fresh, original, and full of optimism as it used to be when it was first released.

The multiple cameras grant the viewer a privileged access to the stage from every possible angle except the perspective of the audience. This creates a filmic space in which we are united with those who create the music, yet are separated from those who listen to it.

The Act of Killing does not concern itself with replicating reality in the typical documentary manner: recording or preserving historical evidence. After all, since the perpetrators have never really denied their heinous acts, the film is not burdened with a need to prove anything.

"I don’t really believe there’s much difference between fiction and documentary. I think it’s basically all film, in which people play themselves by way of performing."

With Lemon Tree Riklis aspires slightly higher, focusing on a practical deadlock in another geographical twilight zone: a fight over a lemon tree grove placed on the green line border between Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Elephant, Van Sant’s ambitious endeavor about real-life psychos, killing fellow students in American high schools—a problem about as easy to ignore as an elephant in the living room—is another effort to reach for what’s hidden, to dig into what only lies beneath, and then to put it on display.

The polemicist who is never afraid to turn to populism and sophistry in order to make an argument is also, it’s easy to forget, a preacher reaching for your heart rather than your mind.

Night and Fog dialectically counterpoints image with sound, past with present, and stasis with movement to set up a thematic tension between our responsibility to remember and the impossibility of doing so, between memory and oblivion or denial.

As an Israeli viewer, I know this fragile serenity is merely the calm before the storm; a hideous siren will soon mark the beginning of the attacks and a moment of historical crisis.