In the annals of the great director/screenwriter collaborations, I don’t know that Carol Reed and novelist Graham Greene get as much credit as they deserve; I don’t know that they could get as much credit as they deserve. They worked together only three times, but the second of those resulted in one of the highest […]

What is cinema? We can speak of its technical aspects: cinema is a medium in which still images (often, but not always photographic in nature) are shown at a fast enough rate to create the illusion of movement. Cinema is a medium of montage, in which the creator shows the viewer a single image followed […]

A review requested by STinG, 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! 2008’s Love Exposure is 237 minutes long, and it somehow manages to need every one of them. In […]

Broadly speaking, writer-director-producer Tyler Perry makes two kinds of feature films: funny ones that are awful, and serious ones that can, from time to time,be okay. The last serious one was Acrimony in 2018, and before that was Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor in 2013, both of which break that general pattern by being […]

The French Connection is the Best Picture Oscar winner from the 1970s that makes me happiest. Not because I think it’s the best of them – it just barely makes the top half of winners that decade for me,* and I’m not even 100% sure I like it best of its nomination class† – but […]

I think it is worth being fair to screenwriters David Desola and Pedro Rivero: I’m sure the genesis of The Platform was at least a little bit more sophisticated than, “what if Snowpiercer was, like, vertical?” But wherever the idea ultimately came from, the comparison is there to be made, and reductive as it is, […]

Back when Westerners had only the vaguest idea of what Japanese animation was all about, and the very notion of an animated film that was intended for an adults-only audience was unspeakably radical in and of itself, three movies were primarily responsible for introducing this bold new form of cinema to the world outside of […]

Above and beyond everything else, The Other is an exceptionally smart film. Not intelligent; smart. It does a superb job of manipulating and guiding its viewer, not just through Thomas Tryon’s script (adapted from his own novel), but through the way it keeps dodging the stylistic norms of its genre. To look at the script, […]