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

This humbling and quietly awe-inspiring first feature from Sophy Romvari could only half-accurately be described as an autobiographical coming-of-age drama . . . Her practice is grounded in the understanding that the real and the merely remembered are separated by the finest and slipperiest of lines.

The debut feature by Bronx native Joel Alfonso Vargas is an instant-classic New York Movie and a lively, sophisticated study of the interrelated imperatives of masculinity and money, grounded in the specifics of a Dominican family in an unaffordable city.

Working with Riz Ahmed, screenwriter Michael Lesslie reimagines Hamlet in a present-day multicultural London that allows for new layers to emerge: questions of agency and belonging in a society that, as you come of age, reveals itself to be more sinister than you had grown up thinking.

This inciting incident enables all manner of eccentric gags throughout The Drama, but little else. As with the Borgli cancel culture satire Dream Scenario (2023), a high-concept hook is aimed at a pressure point in the American zeitgeist and struggles to find purchase.

His films tend to observe this kind of context collapse as people, groups, communities, or even the entire world spiral. Think of the seeming imminent apocalypse of Cure, the suggested one of Charisma, or the fully realized one of Pulse. Chime fits this full arc into a mere 45 minutes.

For these characters, the past and the faraway become convenient displacements for their surrounding horrors. They ramble incoherently about Stalin and Putin, but they cannot seem to face their own regime—not even rhetorically.

Faces are difficult, if not impossible to make out; human and animal figures frequently blend into the background; ordinary spatial relations are distorted to the point of incomprehensibility. At times recalling the impasto intensity of late Godard, its images are vibrant and smeary and altogether beautiful.

By flattening her bitterness and vengeful desire into an ahistorical and essentialized feminine disposition, Gyllenhaal’s portrayal of Shelley at once diminishes the author’s stature in literary history and fails to address any of the documented ways in which she has been wronged.

Below the Clouds, though set in a relatively small area hunkered uneasily between the Phlegraean Fields to the West and towering Vesuvius to the East, is populated with incidents that invite the viewer to contemplate a broader, global apocalyptic moment.

What Does That Nature Say to You is notable not because it eschews dramatic material but because it withholds the usual means of discerning which details are relevant or irrelevant to the nominal drama.

The film so insists on a clean break between libidinous and infantile that the film neuters the ambivalent eroticism fueling the novel.

The filmmakers maintain that the character is not a direct representation of the father they barely knew but a broader symbol of paternal strength and the fallible masculinity it obscures. The resulting work is much less a memory piece than a sustained act of mournful imagining,

The films of Sam Raimi depict, with delirious gusto, the plights of outcasts and weirdos, people out of their element, in over their heads, reckoning with the perils of a world governed by threats of often comical nature.

It is impossible to ignore that the decline of traditional print journalism has resulted in an eradication, and deterioration in quality, of the sort of work at which Hersh excelled. When Hersh cracks a self-deprecating joke about how he’s “slumming it” on Substack now, it’s hard not to despair.