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

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.

The exteriors were shot on 65mm film, the interiors were captured digitally, and they offer different kinds of rapture, the former taking in the vastness of the land with hushed, God-like awe, the latter almost unbearably human, hunkering down in the burnished shadows of rooms sometimes lit by a single candle.

The fleet-footed, amiably wicked Love & Friendship taps into the brisk comedies of Lubitsch, LaCava, McCarey, and Leisen, produced during an age when the best sophisticated drawing room comedy came from barbaric Hollywood.

Synopsized, The Lobster might sound like high-concept science-fiction: a bit of Logan’s Run, a touch of Fahrenheit 451. And after a fashion it is, though there are no jumpsuits, moon boots, retinal scans, plasma cannons, or any other such trappings.

Audiard aspires to the operatic charge of Taxi Driver, but ends up with something more like Death Wish with a gloss of exoticism, forecasting his social prediction for a future in which the refugee exacts righteous revenge upon his aggressors.

This low comedy, then, touches on a few highfalutin ideas: masculinity as performance for one, racial identity as a social construction for another. To one degree or another these things have been a part of Key and Peele’s comedy since their MADtv days.

Incident and emotion play less of a role in determining the frame than pictorial grandstanding, and all of the shallow depth-of-field and moody haze feels like the work of a DP padding his reel.