Reverse Shot

The first clue is in the title. Not in its meaning exactly, but in the fact that when Jacques Tati’s 1967 cri de coeur, three painful years in the making, was finally released in French cinemas, the...

bu Dhabi isn’t exactly a superlative city, save, perhaps, for its interest in superlatives. As the glitzy, modern capital of the UAE, a country that gained independence only 40 years ago, Abu Dhabi...

It’s commonplace to bemoan the sad reality that animation has been so long considered a children's medium. The limitless possibilities for expression and beauty and terror and surreality offered by...

Because Fredric March won the best actor Oscar for his double-role as the twin protagonists in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the film is primarily remembered for his performance. Yet to ignore...

“Repression is the father of neurosis,” chides Patrick MacNee in the first clearly audible moments of The Howling (1981). Fortunately, Joe Dante’s never been one to hold it all in. This is, after...

Some horror movies send you off into the dark night giddy with fear and pleasantly reeling from revulsion. Others give you a glimpse of something so dark and bleak that you’re left with a queasiness...

East meets west on the high seas in Reverse Shot's first Talkie/Direct Address mutation. Watch as DA host Damon Smith and filmmaker Todd Rohal canoe Austin's Town Lake and grapple with even...

Third Night: Whistle and I’ll Come to You Imagine a horror film with no anticipation, no sense of danger, no foreboding, no inexplicable happenings, no haunted house, no droplets of blood or creaking...

David Lynch is not often thought of as a director of horror films, yet for the past 30-plus years he has given us some of the most genuinely terrifying imagery in American cinema. Taking into account...

When Stanley Kubrick announced he was planning on making his first horror movie, people had the right to be afraid. Too often tagged as a cool modernist, the New York–born director (living for many...

Before I saw a single frame of Alien, it had nested under my skin. First imprinted on my underage mind was an image from the movie poster, which depicted an asteroid-like egg hovering over a...

First Night: The Masque of the Red Death To these tired eyes, the greatest development in horror cinema in 2011 was the lack of a new Saw sequel. Keep your severed fingers crossed that this isn’t...

One of the most celebrated works of the great French cartoonist Sempé depicts a man who sees a lady fall over in the street and cannot contain his laughter, just as a large funeral cortège passes by....

Like Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter—its only real rival for the title of Fall’s Best American Film—Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene concludes on a shot that’s either totally declarative or...

Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre starts like a caper film: two shoe-shiners stand at a railway station, waves of sneakers passing by. Then, a fine pair of leather oxfords stops before them. The camera tilts...

An essentially dark drama bathed in tropical sunlight, Alexander Payne’s The Descendants almost dares you to take it seriously. Its glib direct-address voice-over narration, its sitcom-like...

As Andy Warhol well understood, Marilyn Monroe was a particularly modern type of celebrity, better known as an image than any character she played. His screenprinted portraits of her traded on her...

Goodbye First Love, the third feature from Cahiers du cinéma critic turned filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love, resembles her last, The Father of My Children, in several key ways. While the two films tell very...

Monday Hangover: The Thing By Adam Nayman and Michael Nordine “You’ve gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.” It’s too easy, maybe, to invoke David Clennon’s great, bug-eyed exclamation in the 1982 version of...

Jafar Panahi is in danger of being reduced to a cause. Arrested in 2010 on nebulous charges that he was engaged in making a propaganda film attacking the Iranian government, Panahi was sentenced to...