One professional blog I find to be a great resource is reverseshot.org, which is a publication of the Museum of the Moving Image. The museum itself is located in Queens, and is devoted to film, television and digital media. With its many reviews, symposiums and interviews, Reverse Shot is a necessary resource for any aspiring filmmaker. The website is sleek and easy to navigate, and has a very professional feel. It has a number of contributors, all of whom seem quite knowledgable in the realm of film history.

The reviews are very in-depth, and  rarely of blockbusters. In a review of Bridge of Spies, the latest Spielberg film, contributor Jeff Reichert had this to say; “We’re near-always safe with Spielberg; his films are built around an unparalleled clarity of space, and when their imagery functions to disorient our perspective it’s only in order to make the reorientation even more effectively stabilizing. He aims to please.”

The Symposiums are also very informative, and usually focus on a theme or director. In Ring Cycle, an analysis of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, contributor Michael Koresky praises the film’s emotional brutality and iconic boxing scenes. He also goes on to say that the film’s depiction of non-fictional boxer Jake LaMotta elevated the emotional response of the audience;

“Jake LaMotta is no made-up character—in fictionalizing a real man, Scorsese at once elevates him and brings him down to earth. You could use the term larger than life, but life seems to swallow him up. As expressed in the film’s justly famous credit sequence—in which a distant LaMotta bounces and shadowboxes in elegant slow motion on the left side of the 1.85:1 frame, accompanied by the effusive flourish of Pietro Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana”—he is eternally, like all of us, a small man in the corner.”

Ring Cycle is just one post in a series called “Martin Scorsese: He is Cinema,” which analyzes every Scorsese film. This type of insight is necessary if one wants to learn from the greats of filmmaking.