Synonyms is French as hell, which is a bit ironic in and of itself. This is the fourth film made by Israeli director Nadav Lapid, and it’s about an Israeli man named Yoav (Tom Mercier); but it’s also Lapid’s first movie made outside of Israel, and it’s specifically about how Yoav attempts to bury his […]
We have, in Dolemite Is My Name, such a perfect object lesson in what actually matters about movies that it almost feels unfair. This is a competent film – magnificently competent. Screenwriters Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski know exactly how to write this material (in fact, this is basically the fourth time they’ve written precisely […]
Not, by any means, the most important fact about Martin Scorsese’s exhaustive new biographical epic The Irishman, but to me easily the most distracting: it is not titled The Irishman. The film has been adapted by Steven Zaillian from Charles Brandt’s 2004 nonfiction novel I Heard You Paint Houses, and that is the only title […]
Once upon a time, when the Walt Disney Company released a massively successful animated feature and wanted to wring some sequel dollars out of it, they would have the decency to farm them out to the B- and C-team animators at Disneytoon Studios and bury them on home video. In 80 years covering 56 feature […]
A shorter version of this review was previously published at The Film Experience There are two different, and perhaps irreconcilable ways to watch Klaus. First, we could look at it as the directorial debut of Sergio Pablos, an animator who rose through Disney in the 1990s, ending up getting his first supervising animator credits on […]
In 1971, actor and perilously cool individual Steve McQueen willed into existence a film about the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the most important event in international sport car racing; it is titled simply Le Mans, and it is, equally simply, one of the great race movies in history. It is mercilessly clean, focusing intently […]
Waves is an absolute disaster, morally odious on top of being aesthetically confused. But to its credit, it couldn’t be such a thoroughgoing failure if it wasn’t swinging so hard for the fences. The movie’s failure is absolutely not a failure of ambition: writer-director-editor Trey Edward Shults, making his third feature film, has approached this […]
The 2019 Cannes Film Festival was a real punch in the gut: two of world cinema’s most irrepressible eternal adolescents both suddenly grew up all the way to make Old Man movies. Going by their U.S. release dates, we already had Quentin Tarantino show us his autumnal side with Once Upon a Time …in Hollywood; […]
A review requested by Julia, 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 “movies that unnecessarily fall flat on their asses thanks to just one single massive flaw” hall […]
Midway is an English-language film financed substantially with Chinese money, directed by a German, about one of the defining American victories of World War II. If you’re thinking that means it’s probably a muddle, I have good news: you’re not wrong. We could put it another way: you know how Roland Emmerich has kind of […]
The Shining, the motion picture from 1980, is better than The Shining, the novel from 1977, but I will concede the point that the latter is an awfully good read even so, one of the best books ever written by Stephen King. Meanwhile, Doctor Sleep, the 2013 sequel to the 1977 novel (and pointedly not […]
It’s all kind of right there in the concept of Last Christmas. No, no, not the plot, which is muddy and overdone but basically the standard holiday season romantic boilerplate: she’s a Scrooge, he’s guileless and charming, and he eventually forces her to open up to the spirit of loving and giving and so on […]
