A review requested by Steve, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. There are two particular facts about the 1991 Hong Kong blockbuster Once Upon a Time in China that aren’t immediately obvious to the English-speaking viewer (though they’re easy to come by), and which seem to me very important for […]
Not Okay, the Hulu-based sophomore effort from actress-writer-director Quinn Shephard, opens with a much-discussed “content warning” that the film we are about to experience contains “flashing lights, themes of trauma, and an unlikable female protagonist.” It’s a tweak of the viewer’s nose intended to set a cheeky tone and make some kind of statement about […]
In the very first scene of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, screenwriters J.K. Rowling and Steven Kloves make “Dumbledore is gay” canonical in the Harry Potter universe. At the far side of 142 impossibly unhurried minutes, this will turn out to have been the most consequential narrative development of the film. After three films, […]
A review requested by Morgan, 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! To call Southland Tales a messy film would be like calling the Battle of Stalingrad a little scuffle, […]
It was, I believe, my father who introduced me to the phrase “he thinks his shit don’t stink” as a pithy way of denigrating the kind of person who is arrogantly convinced of their righteous infallibility. I will not say of writer-director Adam McKay, and his newest film, Don’t Look Up, that he thinks his […]
Every mainstream movie is commercial product, of course, and plenty of the less-mainstream ones as well. But it’s been a good long bit since I’ve been left as incapable of ignoring that fact as I am with PAW Patrol: The Movie, a throwback to a simpler time in children’s animation when cartoons were not merely […]
Probably the simplest way to start explaining what the living hell we have in front of us with The Twentieth Century, the first feature-length film by avant-garde director Matthew Rankin (who had some fairly substantial attention, by the standards of such things, with the shorts Mynarski Death Plummet in 2014 and The Tesla World Light […]
The, as it were, “house style” of most Romanian films that get exported to the United States with any sort of visibly marketing push is already four-fifths of the way towards documentary: early milestones of the Romanian New Wave like 2005’s The Death of Mr. Lǎzǎrescu and 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days […]
I have from time to time mentioned that I have a rule of thumb for evaluating documentaries that I call the “glossy magazine” test: did I get anything from this movie that I wouldn’t have gotten from reading an article in a glossy magazine on the same subject. It’s basically a way of getting at […]
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. […]
The great Polish director Agnieszka Holland is in the pantheon of European master filmmakers whose work we are more or less required to grapple with, if we take seriously the idea that cinema is an art form. And in this light, it’s not surprising that Mr. Jones, a political history lesson that premiered at the […]
Judas and the Black Messiah is a perfectly fine film about Fred Hampton, a man who deserves much better than a perfectly fine film. If you haven’t heard of Hampton, ah! such a marvelous figure you have in front of you, and truth be told, as a starting point – only as starting point, mind […]
