Every single review of The Zone of Interest, the fourth feature film directed by Jonathan Glazer, at some point will reference the subtitle of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil. Some reviews will mention it in the context of this being a very powerful illustration of Arendt’s most famous idea. […]
A review requested by Kelleson, 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! Midway through director Frank Henenlotter’s sixth and (thus far) last narrative feature, the 2008 Bad Biology, one of […]
A review requested by Mandy Albert, with thanks for 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! The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is perhaps the cult exploitation film of the 2000s. By 2009, when Dutch edgelord auteur […]
The Whale, essentially, does not work – “does not work as a movie”, I am almost tempted to say, in deference to its origins as a well-received stage play by Samuel D. Hunter (adapting the work to a screenplay himself). But frankly, I suspect it’s not any great shakes onstage, either; the dialogue and characterisations […]
Martin McDonagh’s best strength as a director, it is clear at this point, is that he gets to be in the exclusive business of making films with original screenplays by Martin McDonagh. With The Banshees of Inisherin, the celebrated playwright turned cinematic writer-director is now up to four feature films, and that’s ample evidence to […]
Erich Maria Remarque’s undying 1928 anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front has the uncommon fortune for a major literary classic to have been adapted into a major cinematic classic, and this happened almost immediately: the U.S.-produced adaptation that would go on to win the Academy Award for Outstanding Production (i.e., Best Picture) at […]
25 years ago, Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke mightily pissed off some horror-loving cinephiles of my acquaintance with a nasty piece of work called Funny Games. (Just to pour salt in the wound, Haneke remade it almost shot-for-shot a decade later, in English, enticing the unwary with stars Naomi Watts and Tim Roth.) Everyone agreed that […]
There are a few different ways we can make sense of the title of Mad God, a new stop-motion animated feature that’s also not very new at all: with some footage dating back to 1989, it’s one of the longest-in-production films to have ever been released. But probably the simplest explanation is the one we […]
Dying is one of the only two entirely universal human experiences (the other is being born), which would in principal make it one of the great subjects of art, but I guess it’s understandable why it isn’t. Death is, after all, depressing. It frequently involves physical suffering. It is something we don’t like to think […]
Quo vadis, Aida? takes place over a few days in July 1995, in the small town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and if that date in connection to that place has any meaning to you, you already know more or less exactly what kind of movie you’re in for. And also, maybe you don’t. […]
Pieces of a Woman is the kind of film that gets watched because it received a solitary acting Oscar nomination, and even before it received that nomination, it was discussed for literally only two things, one of which is the performance that received that nomination. Which, for the record, belongs to Vanessa Kirby, one of […]
The title character in the 2019 Russian art film Beanpole – for yes, “Beanpole” is a character’s nickname, and in most contexts that would suggest a lightly quirky dramedy, but I did say “Russian” and so you had best be gearing yourself up for some abject misery – is a veteran of the Second World […]
