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

When you adapt a book into a movie it is more about transcribing the emotions you felt when you first read the text.

Certain forms are still anathema to what constitutes serious cinema, and that changes in approach, personnel, or temperament are acceptable so long as they do not disrupt our preconceived notions of the author’s vision.

Tender where most films of its kind are tough, Greet Freedom is nonetheless unflinching in its emotional honesty and highly detailed in its artistry. Also reviewed: Annette and Intregalde.

Diving fully into the fantastical, Green has here turned the allegorical dimensions of his prior films inside out. Steeped in myth and satirical humor, the film betrays a playfully perverse sense of humanity and moral comeuppance.

It is the rare film openly built on the legacy of its forebears that has gone on to influence a wide variety of European art-house cinema.

Jarmusch allows the droll humor to be swallowed in a vacuum of inertia, as if the fate of the world has been foretold and the characters are helpless to reverse what they have started.

In typical Denis fashion, she presents the story through an unfolding series of sensory details: a humid garden, a pile of lifeless bodies, a gathering puddle of sweat and semen.

If, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details, then Chris Kennedy’s 36-minute marvel Watching the Detectives finds in that idea a working metaphor for the modern condition.

Blake Williams has achieved a holistic union of his own that speaks at once to the transformative power of the moving image and the oceanic force of its full deployment.

“The words written in the script are really just for my reference. I never show the actors the screenplay. I find I always get better results with the dialogue if we do some improvisation and run through the scene a few times.”

The deft deployment of overt symbolism, coupled with an empathetic attention to the emotional travails of the characters, allows the film to operate equally well as a theologic parable, an existential comedy, and an anachronistic family drama.

Adrift and alienated, yet invigorated by what she had discovered, Varda felt an immediate kinship with the underrepresented populace of Los Angeles. Channeling these conflicting feelings, Varda would produce a pair of features.

Includes Mimosas, The Death of Louis XIV, Personal Shopper, Elle.

This year’s Competition features a number of burgeoning talents as well as notable critical darlings, resulting in an uncommonly stimulating first week. On Sieranevada, Staying Vertical, Toni Erdmann, Slack Bay, Paterson.

Kämmerer has, over ten years and as many films, established himself as one of Europe’s most exciting and formally economic young filmmakers.

"The film is never going to be transferred to digital. It always has to be shown as film, and it was constructed as a palindrome, so it could be shown from either end, and you can’t really do that with digital."

Why the lapse in recognition for an artist who was not simply an inspiration for her personal and professional partner but the literal author of some of the best films ever produced in the East?

Arabian Nights is essentially composed of a series of indulgences and digressions—some angry and some absurd, all imaginatively composed and unconcerned with the boundaries of traditional storytelling.

The strain from the unfortunate state of worldwide film funding has been felt more than ever at this year’s festival. Features Louder Than Bombs, In the Shadow of Women, One Floor Below.

The quasi-autobiographical nature of Monteiro’s late work comes to a conscious conclusion with Come and Go, which unfolds like a retrospective of its lead character’s—and, by extension, its director’s—various conquests and convictions, before summoning death and ending in a kind of aural benediction.