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

The title of 50/50, a comedy about a young man diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, refers to main character Adam’s chances of living.

Our Idiot Brother presents us with a world in which life is out of balance; to put it in New Age-y terms that Ned might use, many of the female characters embrace too much yang, or masculine energy, and Ned has too much yin, or female energy.

Sarah Kazemy and Nikohl Boosheri shine brightly as Shireen and Atie, the bold teenage heroines of the film. There’s a cinematic symbiosis at play between the two actresses and Keshavarz, herself a first-time director.

In television director Pascal Chaumeil’s cable-ready Heartbreaker, Romain Duris, all matted hair and pit-stained shirts, practically emanates an odor of Roquefort through the screen as Alex Lippi, an unctuous young man making a career of wooing women out of unsatisfactory relationships.

Right off the bat, The Runaways asserts itself as a period piece in more ways than one: the year, 1975, is superimposed over the first shot, which draws our attention to a clot of blood that drops like a ripe fruit from in-between a young girl’s slightly parted, mini-skirted thighs.

There is little room for palpable emotions to flourish under the gloomy, brushed steel skies and oppressively muted palette of An Education.

In Paris, Duris is once again a cog in the Klapisch machine, but this time the attention is more evenly spread out across the cast members, and he’s now dealing with older characters.

So much of Vers Mathilde, Claire Denis’s exploration of the work of Modern dance choreographer Mathilde Monnier, can be appreciated by considering what is not there, what was left out.

For a movie attempting realism, no shade of nuance is given to the characters: they are either all good or all bad.

Sing to me of the man. No, not a mere mortal man. A Legend. Young and troubled, misunderstood and alone, beautiful, damned, visionary, stark raving mad, and far too pure for this world.

Thee Farrellys naturally amp up the gross-out factor every chance they get, which, in this film, only alienates us from characters that were, originally, painfully easy to identify with.

There’s something dubious about a director paying overt homage to his influences, whether it’s Gus Van Sant’s tiresome shot-for-shot Psycho exercise, or Todd Haynes’s subtext-made-blatant Douglas Sirk "update" Far from Heaven, which must have made many ticket-buyers wonder “Would I be better off saving a few bucks and renting All That Heaven Allows?”

I made a solemn vow five minutes into watching Koko: A Talking Gorilla for the first time, which went something like: “Any time I am having a bad day or start to feel blue in the slightest, I will pop on this DVD to help me remember that life is a curious and wonderful gift.”