Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

When confronted with a story as vigorously trashy as the one underlying The Woman in the Window – adapted from the 2018 novel by A.J. Finn, the pen name of Daniel Mallory, a book editor who very openly described how the book came about as a compendium of every trope in popular post-Gone Girl crime […]

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 […]

I could tell you what I thought Assassin 33 A.D. was going to be about, and I would not turn out to have been precisely “wrong”, and it would seem like a completely bugfuck bonkers movie that simultaneously must be seen to be believed, and also is so revolting to human decency that nobody really […]

You may think that this is a straight rip-off of American Psycho, and in some ways you may be right. But this is a woman’s tale. We women are having a moment right now, and this is what we call in Hollywood, an “elevated story concept,” AKA, “the same, but different.” So shut the fuck […]

A review requested by Devin, 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 housekeeping part first: the 1999 animated feature Adolescence of Utena (whose Japanese title more literally translates as […]

“Lunatic visionary cult director Sono Sion makes his English-language debut with a post-apocalyptic samurai Western starring Nicolas Cage” is a collection of words that feels like it was lab-created to end up with a kind of heavily self-aware “Weird”-in-square-quotes example of something too knowing and calculated in its what-the-fuck wildness to be authentic. And arguably, […]

A review requested by David, 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! In the interests of having some way to start talking about FLCL (pronounced, because why the hell not, […]

Ben Wheatley had, in my estimation, one of the most exciting early runs of any director in the last 20 years: a tonally aggressive feature debut with 2009’s Down Terrace, a genuinely visionary horror film with 2011’s Kill List, a surprising pivot to goofy dark comedy with 2012’s Sightseers, and then a psychedelic freak-out costume […]

Making homages to the gialli, Italy’s cultishly beloved violent, stylish thrillers from the 1970s, has become something of a cottage industry over the last few years, going from a fun celebration of a niche interest to a fairly lazy way to jazz up horror stories with bright colors and cryptic storytelling. It takes more than […]

The film that has been released in the United States and the United Kingdom as [The] Iron Mask, with the article disappearing if you (like me) are west of the Atlantic – that banal little title covering up a truly dumbfounding number of AKAs in at least English and Russian including Viy 2, Journey to […]

By Jaysus, is Wild Mountain Thyme a great piece of shite. Sure, and never did I see a film about Ireland and the Irish that was so desperately addicted to the most revolting cartoon stereotypes – in comparison The Quiet Man looks like a documentary, Waking Ned looks like guttural neorealism, and that episode of […]

I am quite sure that I would never have supposed that a filmmaker working in the 1960s would leap to television because of the freedoms it offered. And I have no idea if that’s what actually took place with The Rite, director Ingmar Bergman’s sixth made-for-TV movie, and the first that wasn’t a staging of […]