A Few Great Pumpkins
Every Halloween, Reverse Shot presents a week’s worth of perfect holiday recommendations. So far, read our thoughts on The Bad Seed, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, The Black Tower, and Cure. Check back all week for more, through October 31!
The further one delves into Creton and Barré’s catalogue, the more the films begin to feel like pieces of an indivisible whole, one that encompasses the entirety of their personal and professional lives.
Documenting the high-stakes Chocobar trial and unraveling the state’s deceptions requires a certain amount of linear and coherent storytelling, which Martel has traditionally resisted in her films.
Justly acclaimed for her nonpareil handling of dynamic, kinetic action, Bigelow has now stepped up from crime and mayhem in the streets and war in foreign lands to enter the ultimate arena of high-stakes conflict.
If the cinema of Jafar Panahi has evolved over the past 30 years, partly because of changing circumstances, one can also draw a through line. These movies have much in common—starting with the fact that they are uniformly excellent, challenging, and engaged.
Outside the context of the film, the piano score might sound like the accompaniment for a toasty night by the fireside. Yet Hunt’s minor chords and capricious melodies allow the film a gracious domesticity that works in contrast to its swollen, poignant portrait of disintegration.
With its breathless, alert script, Blue Moon manages to keep expanding and contracting from its central dramatic concern, using the breakdown of Rodgers and Hart's creative partnership to tease out age-old paradoxes between art and commerce, hope and despair, commitment and compromise.
His obliviousness to anything beyond his chain link fence gestures to the political and cultural schism dividing much of America—between draft dodgers and patriots, rioters and the police, those fine with the status quo and those earnestly believing that things can change for the better.
Once we committed to the body camera footage, we were determined to live in it. We wanted to build and recreate the world that this community existed in, which you couldn't do otherwise. So, it was challenging at times, and there were moments I doubted it.
It is by now a cliche to allege that the films of Luca Guadagnino offer more in the way of surface luxuries than intellectual stimulation, but the chasm is especially apparent in a film that at one point finds Roberts stiffly lecturing on the panopticon.
Eschewing the use of talking heads or a slate of statistics, director Geeta Gandbhir reconstructs the narrative largely from police bodycam footage—arguably the true crime idiom of the 2020s, taking the premise of Cops (1989–present) to its optimized conclusion: law enforcement is the camera crew.
The Candid Camera–style, “gotcha” approach has appealed to a new wave of online predator hunters: streamers who transpose the TCaP framework to YouTube, Facebook, Rumble, and Locals. Many of these shows are hosted by survivors, or people one step removed from them.
Like late Ozu, with his parade of seasonally titled shomin-geki exploring the practically endless permutations of family life, Father Mother Sister Brother is a series of intergenerational vignettes.
Across its runtime, The Currents refuses straightforward answers to its questions. In the aftermath of her icy plunge, which she conceals from her husband and daughter, Lina becomes physically repelled by the sound and touch of flowing water.
Magellan is one of the few films to cover this episode of the Age of Discovery, and Lav Diaz uses this stab at a grand seafaring spectacular to reject the idea that white colonialists “discovered” anything at all.