Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

A review requested by Jonny Mugwump, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. At the risk of immediately sounding like the absolute dumbest motherfucker imaginable, I think there’s a very good reason it’s called Picnic at Hanging Rock, not Disappearance at Hanging Rock. Along with L’avventura, this is one of cinema’s […]

George Miller’s directorial career, which only now arrives at Feature Film #10, 43 years after his debut, consists basically of only weird movies and very weird movies, which should make me pause before saying that Three Thousand Years of Longing is the weirdest, and yet here we are. This is, effectively, his “one for me” […]

The grand-scale spectacular biopic Elvis (the fourth narrative treatment of the life of Elvis Presley in any filmed medium to go by that precise title, and at 159 minutes, somehow, also the shortest*) is the first feature directed by Baz Luhrmann in the nine years since The Great Gatsby. It’s been considerably longer since his […]

A review requested by Mandy, 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! Everyone knows who knows anything about Peter Jackson’s third feature film as a director – first released in […]

Everyone please give a warm welcome to our new contributor, Mike D’Angelo! The first thing to know about Nitram, assuming that you don’t want to replicate the abrupt, mortifying “Oh, duh” moment that I experienced about 12 minutes in, is that the film’s title is Martin spelled backwards. (This only registered when people kept pronouncing […]

Categories: oz/kiwi cinema

There are many indelible moments sprinkled across the 128 minutes of The Power of the Dog, writer-director Jane Campion’s first feature film in the twelve long years since 2009’s Bright Star (which was itself her first film in the six long years since 2003’s In the Cut, so if I am doing the math right, […]

Part of me thinks the best thing to do is just to point to the star rating and then tell you only exactly what I knew about Shadow in the Cloud before I sat down to watch it: it’s a World War II movie starring Chloë Grace Moretz as some manner of airwoman, it has […]

Breathing Down Your Neck As you may know if you followed along with Tim’s Australian Winter of Blood, horror from Down Under is something to be reckoned with. When you’re making a film with the intent to scare people who live every minute of their daily lives at risk of being horribly maimed or poisoned, […]

Categories: horror, oz/kiwi cinema

If (as I proposed at the end of my review) 2005’s Wolf Creek is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of 21st Century Australian horror – aggressively nihilistic, full of pointless violence without catharsis – I guess it would have to be the case that Wolf Creek 2 would therefore be the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 of […]

We can learn a great deal about the 2013 remake of the 1978 horror film Patrick simply by looking at where it came from. Director Mark Hartley was, by training, a documentary filmmaker, and the ’13 Patrick was his first narrative feature. That doesn’t tell us much by itself – lots of documentarians make the […]

The late and quite unlamented (by me, anyway) horror subgenre of torture porn was, if it was anything, aggressively unpleasant. Watching extended scenes of human having miseries realistically inflicted upon them without the sweet release of death would sort of have to be; this is the difference between the torture films and other gore-driven subgenres, […]

I hope I will not devalue Lake Mungo if I describe it as a film that feels absolutely perfect for 2008. That suggests, I am afraid, that it has very little to offer for those of us living later than 2008, and this is not at all the case. But I think the film would […]