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

Filming in various countries across the northern Levant, though never specifying which from scene to scene, Rosi chooses small, spare stories that are more concerned with affecting the viewer than informing them.

Isabella has films within films, plays within plays, and people within people. As in its central mise en abyme, the director creates an abyss of rhyme and recurrence. His mode of adaptation works reflexively, where these layers upon layers lead to a sense of collapse.

This week’s pair of writers semi-escape from their respective realities in São Paulo and New York by entering worlds of noir-ish fatalism and ironic hope with Kaurismäki and Truffaut.

It is not interested in the hospital as a site of sickness. Tortum’s documentary is concerned with workers—the human element that can transform the moribund into a “festive” feeling—following the daily doings of surgeons, nurses, janitors, dieners, students, and professors.

Rather than servicing the melodrama of the film, as in Black Coal’s mood-washed frames of neon red and icy blue, Diao’s flamboyant visual style here works sardonically—accentuating evil in a strange, unfamiliar way.