Reverse Shot

Godardian teenage angst paean or super-sized Keystone Cops episode? Or perhaps Gerardo Naranjo’s I’m Gonna Explode is just an unholy mix of both. In the film, two teenagers from Guanajuato, Mexico, their anger indirectly targeted at an apparently cruel,...

The bathing of bloodied knuckles in a small sink opens the film Hunger, the debut feature by British video artist Steve McQueen. As the owner of these knuckles silently proceeds through his daily rituals, the film offers no suggestions...

In Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2005) a character played by the singer-songwriter Will Oldham sits in front of a campfire in the wilds of Oregon and expounds on his ideas about the shape of the universe. Perhaps for the...

Since most contributors to and readers of ReverseBlog are wise enough not to follow professional sports and thus will never understand what it is like to have your heart broken and soul shattered by a team you have rooted for...

Mike Leigh has followed up one of his dreariest films, 2004’s Oscar-nominated Vera Drake, with one of his breeziest. Happy-Go-Lucky, which stars the ingratiating Sally Hawkins as Poppy, an improbably good-natured primary school teacher, opens with a burst of...

To follow Jia Zhangke’s career closely is to witness a great, restless artist wriggle out of a number of our film culture’s pigeonholes. Despite his reputation as a master in the school of austerity—that art-house mode which has encouraged...

Despite—or perhaps because of—its Palme d’Or win at Cannes earlier this year, word on the street is that Laurent Cantet’s The Class is a weak opening night selection for 2008 New York Film Festival, a tepid piece of liberal...

Maybe sometime in the next decade, the Iraq War will get its Platoon or its Full Metal Jacket, but for now, we'll have to keep waiting for a memorably incisive, dramatically successful cinematic treatment—at least, from a fiction film...

Is there anything sadder?...

The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela is a quasifictional film that employs traditional documentary technique to tell the story of Raquela Rios, a Filipino transsexual woman who dreams of leaving her limited existence as a part-time streetwalker in Cebu...

Spike Lee is awkwardly caught between nobility and pulp with his latest, Miracle at St. Anna. The film plays minute to minute like a Sam Fuller-esque two-fister, but those minutes add up, incongruously, to one hell of a ponderous...

Just as the 2008 New York Film Festival's about to get started, two of last year's best entries, Silent Light and The Man from London, are finally getting something of a release in New York, at the Museum of...

Ryan Little's Forever Strong is a friendly, heaping helping of rugby porn—in senses both erotic and non. Seemingly cast top to bottom with holdovers from Flaunt photo-spreads and David DeCoteau flicks (in fact, fans of DeCoteau's boxer-brief brand of...

If you're asking that question, then a further question arises: What on earth are you doing here at Reverse Shot? Then again, if you have stumbled here, stay a while, peruse our brand new 23rd symposium and all (well...most)...

Let's say the least you expect of art is that it shows signs of a coherent designing intelligence, and the least you expect of entertainment is that it doesn't make you wish you were looking at something else. Now...

Since virtually inventing Asian-American cinema in 1982 with his film Chan Is Missing, Wayne Wang has built a curiously Frankensteinian body of work, mixing indie and commercial productions and spanning subjects as diverse as a lazy Brooklyn afternoon and...

An inevitable byproduct of the study of history is the "What if?" game, the second-guessing of key events and decisions in light of the disasters that followed. One of the great American "What if?"s of the twentieth century is...

The Coens have spent their careers perfecting the anti-“Wrong Man” narrative. Whereas Hitchcock heightened suspense and audience-character identification by situating hapless, ordinary protagonists within extraordinary situations they seemingly have no control over, the Coens get off on watching their...

If we could only harness the righteous indignation in and around Hounddog, we could heat our homes for free this winter. "Writer-director Deborah Kampmeier, 42, suffered the thousand indignities shoestring independent features are heir to—and then some," reported Premiere....