Ultimately, On the Basis of Sex is exactly the thing it most evidently appears to be: a paint-by-numbers biopic that rewards its audience for having politics more socially progressive than people had 50 years ago, and which was clearly aiming for Oscar glory until the distributor figured out far enough in advance that it was […]
A review requested by Erin, 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! History remembers Franco Zeffirelli mostly for his 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, and history goes on to […]
The Upside premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, and didn’t receive commercial release in the United States until January 2019 (the demise of The Weinstein Company factored into this). That’s not “commercial release following an Oscar-qualifying run in one Los Angeles theater.” That’s commercial release. There’s such a thing as a distributor knowing […]
The general tenor of reviews of Glass suggest that, after a two-film renaissance consisting of 2015’s The Visit and 2017’s Split, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan is up to his bad old tricks again. But I don’t know, I think that this actually is a return to form: sharp-looking movies with with an elegantly classical visual […]
The most overwhelming takeaway from Private Life is that Tamara Jenkins needs to be enabled to make more movies. In a career stretching 20 years, the writer-director has only now made her third feature, following Slums of Beverly Hills in 1998 and The Savages in 2007, and once again she’s created an immaculate gem of […]
The 2017 January release A Dog’s Purpose, based on a book by W. Bruce Cameron (who co-wrote the script with four other people, among them Cathryn Michon), and produced by Gavin Polone, is a movie in which the entire concept of the plot hinges on watching the same dog die five different times as it […]
There is a thing that costume dramas sometimes do, and it always annoys me, and Mary Queen of Scots does it a whole lot: make characters who weren’t even progressive by their own era’s standards progressive by our own. What we have here is a story about two people who very much existed, and about […]
The Sisters Brothers is first and foremost just a damn solid Western. This isn’t really surprising: director Jacques Audiard (making his eighth feature film and his first in English) has largely made it his business to make damn solid movies in traditional genres, and it’s increasingly looking like A Prophet, which was more like an […]
Ultimately, there is a grand total of one test that Welcome to Marwen has to pass, and it does not. To wit, does this film do anything to justify its existence in face of the 2010 documentary Marwencol, which treats on exactly the same subject as this highly fantasised biopic, and does so with great […]
The script for what eventually became the simply awful comedy Holmes & Watson was first announced in 2008. After a couple of cast changes, the project was shot in 2017 and delayed twice before appearing as one of the least-merry films that could possibly have opened on Christmas Day, 2018. That decade weighs heavily on […]
Previously reviewed at the Film Experience Many directors have had great years, in which they’ve released two (or more!) tremendously good films that demonstrate the breadth of their skills. But very, very few directors have ever had a years like Yuasa Masaaki had in 2017. This was the year that the animation genius, whose work […]
