Whatever else we can say about it, 24 Frames sure as hell is different. The final film by the late master director Abbas Kiarostami (it premiered a little under a year after his death) would already have my affection just for being such a swerve, albeit a totally in-character swerve. After briefly leaving Iran to […]
I speak from personal experience in stating that being hypnotised is nothing like it’s presented in pop culture (this is going someplace, I promise). It’s not at all about blacking out and waking up without realising time has passed, but also now you’re wearing a hat made out of your pants. It’s more like… you’re […]
Director Joshua Marston began his career in TV journalism, and somehow that feels exactly right. Not one of his films have been a documentary, and not one of them have had anything like a documentary aesthetic, but they have do have one important element of great journalism: they observe. The filmmaker’s approach is long on […]
I’m not sure that I have such a thing as a list of the filmmakers that I’d be interested in seeing make a biopic of legendary critic, filmmaker, political agitator, and cantankerous asshole Jean-Luc Godard. But I am 100% certain that Michel Hazanavicius would be nowhere remotely near that list if it existed. The one […]
Screened at the 20th Wisconsin Film Festival. Minding the Gap might be the best coming-of-age movie of the 2010s, in part because it wasn’t designed as such, and the subject which comes-of-age isn’t necessarily a human adolescent, but the movie itself. The film is the feature debut of director Bing Liu, a young man who […]
In the film Rampage, in the office of its over-the-top villains, there is a copy of the 1986 arcade game Rampage, and this cute gesture raises ontological questions that the film is unprepared to address. Does Rampage exist within the universe of Rampage? Do the characters in the movie in fact realise that they are […]
Every Wes Anderson film is “quirky”, but I think with Isle of Dogs – the director’s ninth feature film in 22 years – we’ve finally gotten to the first one that’s just flat-out fucking weird. Whether it is the good kind of weird or the not-so-good kind is not a question I expect to resolve […]
A review requested by Brennan Klein, 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! By the start of 1988, Pedro Almodóvar had already made six features, including at least one candidate […]
In the first decade of the 21st Century, Argentine director Lucrecia Martel made three feature films and instantaneously became one of the most important and exciting voices in international cinema: first came 2001’s La Ciénaga, then 2004’s The Holy Girl, then 2008’s The Headless Woman, and then silence. Not calculated silence; just one of those […]
Screened at the 20th Wisconsin Film Festival. Be forewarned: I don’t think it’s possible to discuss this film without sounding like a pretentious ass, and anyway, I wasn’t trying not to. Both in person and online, I have encountered the criticism-or-maybe-it’s-just-an-observation that if you don’t know what The Green Fog is doing before you see […]
Movies can be frustrating in any number of ways, but maybe the most frustrating is when an almost-great movie misses that target for just one dumb reason. Witness A Quiet Place, which is microscopically close to being my favorite American thriller in at least several months, maybe even a year or two, and instead has […]
The best scene in Love, Simon happens somewhere in the middle, as the closeted gay teenage title character (Nick Robinson), in a fit of frustration, supposes that he’d prefer to put off coming out until college, when he’ll be in the rush of getting to redefine himself from head-to-toe anyway. This is realised in one […]
