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

As shot by Storaro, lush, verdant Southern California and the sparkling Pacific have never looked quite so Mediterranean, if not Elysian, the figures rimmed in an amber daylight, the coloration of the deep-focus photography given the pop of stained-glass or hand-painted movie posters.

With its sentimental score, passage of seasons, understatedly treated deaths, and aversion to the kind of confrontation that would make viewers truly uncomfortable, this is very much a Kore-eda film, but there is a steely center.

At his best, Spielberg expresses ideas through action, as he did in parts of the motion-capture animation The Adventures of Tintin. The BFG is mostly logy and prosaic, especially when it gets into its speech-heavy final scenes, which recall not the high-points of its maker’s career, but the soggy sentimentality of Hook.

The core Gondrian theme of creative escape from deep-set melancholy reappears in his latest feature, Microbe and Gasoline, a sweet and funny, but ultimately downbeat road movie.

Les Cowboys is the latest neo-noir to draw inspiration from The Searchers. As the Indian captivity myth (and specific cases of Comanche abductions of female settlers) inspired the 1954 novel by Alan Le May, the revered John Ford adaptation has spawned its own progeny.

Refn is a prim provocateur next to the likes of Anger and Harrington, who worked from an experience of genuine sexual outlawry. As for Kubrick, well, along with the Aronofsky film Black Swan, The Neon Demon may be said to belong to the burgeoning subgenre of Kubrickian kitsch.

As the writer-director of seventeen feature films in nineteen years (a Fassbinderian pace), whose work has been screened on multiple continents in the context of film festivals, Hong surely recognizes the ritual nature/torture of the filmmaker Q&A.

This adaptation of Cosmos, the final novel by the great Polish modernist Witold Gombrowicz, directed by Andrzej Zulawski, is gorgeous, ceaselessly lively and funny, while also evincing a melancholic view of the human condition.

To watch this epically scaled South Korean horror-procedural hybrid by Na Hong-jin is to see a filmmaker flush with the desire to craft a classic.

Every one of its 107 minutes is dedicated to De Palma talking us through his career, one film at a time, which generates an expectation of comprehensiveness that, perhaps appropriately given his dualistic themes and aesthetics, both is and is not fulfilled.

The Witness, directed by James Solomon, delves beneath the case study to engage with the once living, breathing person, through the eyes of Kitty’s younger brother, Bill Genovese.

What is important about Minervini’s film politically is that he links this brand of American revanchism not to a particular candidate but to a geographically predicated and economically defined ideology of isolation simmering unto paranoia.

You get the feeling Kaili is at a crossroads of not only modernity and custom but also industry and nature, with cement caverns and tenements sculpted into the sides and innards of lush, green hills and talk of old rituals and local lore, however mournful or unsettling, striking life into the film’s dark interiors.

Ben Wheatley’s filmbowdlerizes a queasily mesmerizing piece of fiction into dystopian nostalgia; apparently even the apocalypses were sexier in the 1970s.