A review requested by Brian, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. “The world of Canadian documentary filmmaking” is a phrase that sounds like I’m being sarcastic, or at least deadpan, but I swear I’m not – the world of Canadian documentary filmmaking is long-lived and important, one of the places […]
It’s surely easy to overstate how groundbreaking the film Koyaanisqatsi was at the time of its enthusiastically-received 1982 premiere and its massive-hit-by-cult-film-standards commercial release in 1983, but I would be much more wary of diminishing it than puffing it up. Ever since it was young, an honest reckoning with the techniques and aesthetics of this […]
A review requested by Carl, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! There’s nothing unusual about two films with an unplanned resonance with each other coming out at about the […]
At first glance, Laura Poitras’ latest documentary appears to represent a stark change of pace. In a directorial career that dates back almost 20 years, she’d worked exclusively in the political arena, making docs about the U.S. occupation of Iraq (My Country, My Country), America’s abuses in pursuit of the “war on terror” (The Oath), […]
Consider this a high compliment: It would have taken me quite some time, had I not been aware of the fact in advance, to recognize All That Breathes as a documentary. The film’s first shot consists of a lengthy, slow track across a nighttime landscape in an as-yet-unidentified locale—one that appears to be urban or […]
Woe betide anybody who sits down in front of Moonage Daydream expecting to learn something concrete about David Bowie. That’s not a criticism, let me hasten to clarify—expository documentaries generally leave me wishing that I’d read a book or lengthy article on the subject instead, and I was drawn to this film less as a […]
Proximity serves as both fascination and frustration in Fire of Love, a documentary portrait of the Alsatian French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. Let’s begin with physical proximity, since it was the couple’s penchant for cozying up to active volcanoes that captured the world’s imagination and—this isn’t remotely a spoiler; the movie informs us of […]
Throughout her career, Andrea Arnold has told stories about women in constrictive circumstances who seek liberation via danger, whether that takes the form of stalking someone via CCTV monitors (Red Road), getting involved with a much older man (Fish Tank), or living in a van alongside Shia LaBeouf (American Honey). The subject of Arnold’s latest […]
Ascension, the extraordinarily confident feature-length debut of documentarian Jessica Kingdon, manages the seemingly impossible feat of being, all the same time, a thrilling formal object transforming the stuff of real life into abstract visual art; a very angry diatribe about the the human cost of industrialisation in modern China; and a patiently curious, hands-off observation […]
There is a moment in Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) , about 57 minutes into the 118-minute film, where we see something that is not at all meaningful in and of itself: in the middle of a performance of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” by Gladys Knight & […]
In August 2015, four of the world’s top bridge players – Norwegians Boye Brogeland and Espen Lindqvist, and Americans Allan Graves and Richie Schwartz – announced that they were relinquishing three championship titles they had won while playing as a team in 2014 and 2015. One of these was for the 2014 Spingold Knockout Championship; […]
A review requested by Brian Fowler, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! It’s not at all hard for me to imagine a viewer who, upon learning that there exists […]
