Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: Alpha dramatises the time that humans first turned wolves into dogs. The subsequent relationship between species has been commemorated […]

From among the Video Nasties If you were to know only the title of the film Tenebrae, you might think- actually, you would probably have no clue. Before I saw it the first time, I think I had some vague sense that it might have something to do with the spinal column, because of -brae. […]

A review requested by Erin, 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! The first thing likely to kill any modern performance of William Shakespeare’s plays is the line reading. This […]

The one good thing about living in some godforsaken quadrant of the country where the luscious awards-season heavy hitter Call Me by Your Name took forever and then some to open is that, by the time I had my chance to catch up with it, it had already moved from “rapturous praise” to “mild backlash”, […]

A review requested by Maciej, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Director Vittorio De Sica released the bitter and grim Bicycle Thieves in 1948 and the utterly crushing Umberto D. in 1952, and in between them made only one film, about the dirt-poor inhabitants of a shantytown. With […]

Whatever else we can say about it, L’attesa is hella art film. If you fell asleep in 1965 and just woke up, you’d probably find nothing exceptional about it, assuming that all European (and especially Italian) “serious cinema” was like this: gorgeously shot, minimally paced, perhaps more ambiguous than it needs to be, chilly and […]

It’s of course lazy and arguably bigoted, speaking to a cramped sample set, to suggest that Italian Filmmaker A and Italian Filmmaker B resemble each other in no small part because they are both Italian. But it is a national cinema that particularly favors enormous, lavish spectacle, and there’s never been a point since WWII […]

A review requested by Marc Lummis, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There are many indisputably great films that it’s clearly impossible for any normal audience member to complete unpack in all their nuances without the aid of some highly specialised arcane knowledge, but even then, writer-director Bernardo […]

A review requested by Julian D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The career of director Michelangelo Antonioni is not the kind that can be neatly summed up in blunt descriptions like “culmination”, so I can’t use that word to describe his 1975 triumph The Passenger. It does, […]

A review requested by Josep, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There are plenty of things that could be one’s immediate response to Big Deal on Madonna Street, a 1958 Italian caper movie that is one of the small handful of films directed by Mario Monicelli to have […]

A second review requested by David Greenwood, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Knowing, as one can’t help but know, that Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is the most god-damned notorious art film of them all for its grotesque displays of violence, warped sexuality, and […]

1982’s The New York Ripper is a very, very, very special motion picture: it represents the exact moment at which the great Italian horror master Lucio Fulci transformed into the hacky Italian schlockmeister Lucio Fulci. The transition was achieved very cleanly: outside of two scenes which could stand along any giallo of the ’70s for […]