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

The current myth and meme-ification of Tom Cruise leaves out many of the specifics of the actor’s versatile and daring career.

Jonathan Millet has crafted a humanist spy thriller set amid the lingering memories of the Syrian civil war and the atrocities perpetrated by Bashar al-Assad’s regime that is both satisfyingly tense and gently hopeful.

The film asks its audience to question the very nature of narratives, of artifice, of truth, fiction, and the mechanisms artists use to achieve their ends.

Lesage is not looking for easy answers in his work, and he is adamantly opposed to telling his audience who to root for. While his films are darkly funny, they are also the inheritors of a more serious European existential and Freudian tradition.

These killers are seldom forced to face their victims, and because of this, they are free to live in a sanitized world of rationalizations and moral fantasies, remaining comfortable even as the earth and its inhabitants are dying just outside their doors.

Maddin and the Johnsons here trade their decaying, manic images for something more coolly sustained and unsettling, creating an insular nocturnal mindscape where the banal and fantastic seamlessly mingle.

Midi Z’s film, shot between 2017 and 2023, documents the period leading up to the 2021 coup by the Tatmadaw—Myanmar’s military—that deposed the democratically elected National League for Democracy and installed a military junta.

Whereas the towering novel from which it takes its name, a timely meditation on the political and cultural environment in Europe leading up to the first world war, lives largely in its characters, Chachia and Voigt’s film, instead, personifies the “magic mountain” itself to unique and ghostly effect.

The film feels emotionally authentic, and while its narrative runs the risk of being a litany of heartbreaking moments, its unparalleled specificity and peerless performances, particularly the two non-actor leads, preserve its integrity.

The film has a knack for unexpected turns, avoiding the obvious in favor of sly emotional crescendos. The Eight Mountains takes care to do just enough dramatic sculpting to make sure its emotional inflection points resonate.

Herbaria offers audiences a unique meditation on extinction and preservation in the twinned worlds of plants and film. Shot on 35mm and 16mm, this mysterious, at times cryptic, essayistic work takes viewers to two locations: the seemingly disparate Buenos Aires Botanical Garden and the Museo del Cine.

2nd Chance presents another story from the annals of capitalist pathology, but this time, what we see is almost too wild to be true. Entrepreneur and inventor Richard Davis has had the distinction of shooting himself more than 100 times.

An appreciation of George A. Romero's beloved, decades-spanning horror epic, in conjunction with MoMI's screening series Films of the Dead: Romero & Co., June 25–July 30.
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The Balcony Movie is about the contingency of human perspective and what that means for our lives and relationships, but it is also about what thoughtful works of art can create.

Chandler’s film achieves a chilling elegance. Bulletproof forgoes the overly scripted, interview-heavy approach of many contemporary documentaries, and instead presents a stream of unhurried tableaux, crafting a nuanced and complex vision of the nexus where guns and schools meet.

The feature debut from Melvin Van Peebles uses the possibilities opened by the New Wave (jump cuts, pop music, repetition) to explore something profound about race, identity, life, love, the world, and its rediscovery and restoration is an occasion for celebration.

For someone like me, there was not an opportunity to dream or to imagine being an artist. I came from a background where my father said I did not need to imagine art, I did not need to learn painting or music, I just needed to find a job.

I bought a 16mm Bolex windup camera in 1987. And that is the camera I use. Wow. Can you think of all the cameras and cell phones and computers and laptops that each one of us has had in those intervening years? And I love that. I don't have to worry about batteries.