Inspired by @Katoi's declaration of love for camera trickery, I've been thinking about some of my favourites on a particular theme: the ambiguous mirror. Here's a good example from Ghost (a lovely film in many ways, and 30 years old as of yesterday).

Jean Cocteau got there early and threw all sorts of inventiveness and imagination at the task. Of course, Cocteau was one of the very best at bending the inherently representative, realistic tools of cinema towards impressionistic, poetic, even oneiric ends.

Alain Resnais' cubist cinema saw him mess with time, space and their overlaps in many ways. It might take a moment to work out where the mirroring is and isn't in this shot from Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime.

If I'm not mistaken, Chris Smith used a little 'CG smudging' to slightly mess up his classical in-camera trickery for this shot from Triangle.

When it comes to the 'Groucho stunt' of having two actors - one playing the reflection and one as the 'original' - it rarely gets more fun than Evil Dead 2. A great shot from an all-time classic sequence of lower-budget, higher-wit creativity.

Arguably the mirror trick to end them all is from Robert Zemeckis' Contact but this really doesn't belong in a compendium of in-camera tricks. Let me cheat and say that, seeing as we're going through the looking glass here, normal rules can't apply.

Building two versions of the same room and putting nothing between them is a timeless classic. Here's Coppola's take on the trick from Peggy Sue Got Married.

James Cameron's version of the same trick allowed the Terminator to go to pieces.

While Christopher McQuarrie used the no-mirror technique to give Mission: Impossible masks a remarkable level of realism - by having the latex face be played, in camera, by a real one.

Pulling this trick off properly required some careful production design - including flopped typography on book spines.

Even The Muppets had a go, when Constantine was on the scene and causing chaos in Muppets Most Wanted. Kermit is, of course, very good at this. What can't he do?

Previously: a great 'reflective puddle' shot from Poltergeist III. https://twitter.com/brendonconnelly/status/1265962263250419712

And slightly more previously than that: when movies feature both deliberate and accidental reflections in glass. https://twitter.com/brendonconnelly/status/1265561950454415362

Thanks to @TheBadNewsFairy for the reminder of this barmy twist on the format from Airplane! After Ghost, that's two entries in the same fairly specific thread by Jerry Zucker. This is the auteur theory in action, right?

This long tracking shot from Sucker Punch starts with empty frames between the actors and ends, or so it looks to me, with actual mirrors slipped into place. Just one of many Alice in Wonderland tropes in the movie.