Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

We’re living through a golden age of “the rich are evil and out of touch, and must be destroyed!” pop culture objects being made by people who are, themselves, extremely rich and out of touch, and are acting (one suspects) less out of a place of good honest class betrayal than a neurotic need to […]

Categories: comedies, satire, thrillers

The 2019 anti-mystery Knives Out has a game cast and an interestingly annoying structural conceit, buried (but not very deeply!) below some very dumb social satire and “extremely online” cultural touchstones. It is very much a “fix this one thing, and you’ve really got something here” proposition, but unfortunately, it was written and directed by […]

There are those filmmakers whose artistic focus is so much on the creation of deeply over-designed worlds and heightened visual style, and so little on anything resembling tight storytelling and naturalistic emotions (I am, to be clear, not saying that this is a bad thing), that learning they are about to make their very first […]

A review requested by Brian, 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 costume drama is a genre as old as the movies themselves (The Execution of Mary, Queen of […]

It’s incredibly difficult to discuss Flux Gourmet without starting at “this is a film by Peter Strickland”, which isn’t even the most useful way into the film, in this case. One of Strickland’s two biggest identifying characteristics doesn’t apply here: while all three of Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy, and In Fabric (his […]

A review requested by Gavin, 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! Tommy, the 1975 feature film adaptation of the 1969 concept album by The Who, is an erratic, garish […]

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. In the week now ending: Downton Abbey: A New Era is a movie with a script by Julian Fellowes, focused on […]

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 […]

In the early parts of Mainstream, it appears that producer, director, and co-writer (with Tom Stuart) Gia Coppola was really anxious to make her own version of Aunt Sofia’s The Bling Ring. It is not very good at this, and also, by the time the film’s glacially-paced 94 minutes are over, this will seem like the […]

The Man Who Sold His Skin is the kind of movie that sounds better when you’re hearing about it – or even when you’re describing it – than when you’re actually in front of it, watching it. If I were to tell you the ideas it was playing with, and how it assembles them all […]

The mash-up at the heart of Breaking News in Yuba County makes perfect sense, even if the results are terrible. The film takes the lacerating cynicism of Gus Van Sant’s 1995 newsmedia satire To Die For and mixes it in with the “several idiots trying to run several different cons; violent farce ensues” of Joel […]