The book-length interview Hitchcock/Truffaut (one of the greatest texts about how filmmakers make films that you will ever read), was first published in 1966, at which point Alfred Hitchcock’s newest film was Torn Curtain, from that summer. He didn’t have very much to say about it to François Truffaut, skimming over a few sequences, point […]
I will say this for 2009’s Anacondas: Trail of Blood – it’s not much, but I’ll say it – it’s surprising that a film made directly back-to-back with Anaconda 3: Offspring isn’t much worse. Comparing the two films, there’s absolutely no contest: the fourth movie in the Anaconda franchise (and the last one, barring a […]
The “kitchen sink” period of British theater and cinema – stretching for a little more than ten years from the mid-’50s to the late-’60s – is, to my mind, much more “admirable” than it is “good” or “watchable”. The movement was all about radicalism, violating social taboos that have long since become social norms, and […]
Stories disagree on what, exactly, is up with Simon of the Desert. The received wisdom is that the funding got slashed during production, and so director-writer Luis Buñuel had to come up with a way to end the movie on the spot, using the last day to quickly tie things off of what ended up […]
Fred Zinnemann is the epitome of a certain kind of film director. He was a workhorse – not a hack, not somebody who’d just show up and do the job in the most uninspired way, but somebody who still did obviously view it as a job. There’s nothing flashy in a Zinnemann film, but they’re […]
Animation and surrealism – and I am here referring to surrealism in a narrower sense (though not the strictest sense), as the attempt to visually reconcile dream-reality and waking-reality into a single state, not as an intensified word for “weird” – have a difficult relationship. On the one hand, since surrealism is, in its way, […]
The cliché – and it is a cliché that the film justifies – is to describe A Brighter Summer Day, Edward Yang’s monumental fourth feature, from 1991, as “novelistic”. Indeed it is, and I can think of no word that better captures the film’s sprawl (it comes in with a running time just a few […]
There is point in the lifecycle of many franchises where they are truly lost, beyond the hope of salvation. In the ’80s, it was going direct to VHS; in the ’90s and ’00s, it was going to direct to cable; in the ’10s, it was going direct to streaming. Same thing in different clothes: the […]
There are some movies that deserve to be better-known, but one can understand why they aren’t: lack of home video availability, they’re too old, they’re too difficult, they’re too small, and plenty of other reasons. This is not the case with Eve’s Bayou, Kasi Lemmons’s 1997 directing and screenwriting debut. There are, of course, some […]
Diary of a Country Priest, from 1951, was the third feature film directed by French director Robert Bresson, and it is the hinge on which his entire career pivots. Prior to this point, he made the kind of films people were making in France in the ’40s: solemn melodramas for respectable middle class audiences who […]
The learning curve for early sound cinema was steep and fast. In the immediate wake of the enormously popular sync-sound scenes from 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the American film indsutry jumped with great enthusiasm and no planning into making some of the most awkward, unwatchable films of its entire history across the course of 1928, […]
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! Magical realism is a tough thing to get right in movies: it’s a mode that’s all about delicate […]
