The House Next Door would like to direct your attention to a special edition of the online film magazine Reverse Shot, for which the editors solicited pieces on specific directors who’ve embraced digital filmmaking technology.

“Unfortunately,” the editors lament, “no one picked up the offered gauntlet of The Godfather vs. Youth Without Youth.”

But someone thought long and hard about Robert Zemeckis: Here’s Jeff Reichert’s insightful consideration on the director’s shift from celluloid to binary, using “Cast Away” and “The Polar Express” as points of contrast.

[UPDATE: At Adam’s suggestion, here’s another worthy read from the same issue, as mutual friend and fellow TFCA member Andrew Tracy compares Chris Marker’s still-essential “Sans Soleil” and his more recent “Level Five”.]

Also shocking: While I was putting this post together, HND co-editor Keith Uhlich broke the news that Matt Zoller Seitz, who founded the blog, is leaving print criticism. He’ll still be hanging around, doing stuff online and “making some really short apropos-of-nothing documentaries”, but he will no longer be writing reviews as such.

For those of us who’ve been enjoying his work in the New York Times, among other outlets, this comes as a shock. And also it sucks.

Explanations of a sort are offered in a lengthy conversation between the editors on their site, available here; it’s also available as a podcast.

This is me, bummed.