Calling 1969’s The Passion of Anna by that name is already doing too much work in tidying up a film that’s almost perversely happy at how messy it is. Certainly, it is the messiest film directed by Ingmar Bergman, a director much more driven to crisp, clean, focused (to some of his critics, focused to […]
Since erupting into the world with the exquisite Oscar-nominated 2000 short Rejected, animator/director Don Hertzfeldt literally hasn’t made anything that isn’t at least great, and in that time span he has produced multiple candidates for the title of the most important, medium-redefining piece of animation made by an American in the 21st Century. But the […]
There have been horror movie icons since the 1920s, and naturally enough, every one of them has to have their Very Last Horror Movie. But not a one of them had a grand finale to their time as a star of horror movies like Vincent Price, who was shipped out of the genre in grand […]
Breathing Down Your Neck As you may know if you followed along with Tim’s Australian Winter of Blood, horror from Down Under is something to be reckoned with. When you’re making a film with the intent to scare people who live every minute of their daily lives at risk of being horribly maimed or poisoned, […]
Truth in advertising: The Dark and the Wicked is basically nothing else beyond the two adjectives promised by its title. The fourth film directed by Bryan Bertino (whose failure to generate a high-profile career after his 2008 debut The Strangers remains a bizarre mystery to me) is the latest entry in the blossoming genre of […]
I am quite sure that I would never have supposed that a filmmaker working in the 1960s would leap to television because of the freedoms it offered. And I have no idea if that’s what actually took place with The Rite, director Ingmar Bergman’s sixth made-for-TV movie, and the first that wasn’t a staging of […]
“This movie had really great jump scares” isn’t much of a compliment: jump scares are, are they not, the resource of a filmmaker who cannot make something properly scary, the kind of scary that soaks into your bones like a tenacious autumnal dampness, cold and dead. They’re a fast and easy way to get the […]
1974 is awfully damn late to be indulging in William Castle-style carnival barker tactics to sell a movie – that belongs to an age of cheesy B-movies, not an age of grim, violent grind house fodder. But that is, nonetheless, exactly what The Beast Must Die gets up to, over the vehement objections of its […]
Miss American Pie A review by Brennan Klein I suppose I can’t say in good conscience that American Pie Presents: Girls’ Rules is the thing I least expected to happen in 2020, but it’s at least in the top 5. Lord knows you can’t keep a good franchise down, but the last peep we heard […]
In the year of our Lord 2020, you have either made your peace with Sofia Coppola’s entire filmmaking project focusing on stories of upper-class women suffering from an indescribable ennui – women whose biographies overlap in significant ways with Coppola herself – or you have not. As long as they remain insightful and clever, I’m […]
It is with a distinct tinge of melancholy that I welcome From Beyond the Grave to the pages of Alternate Ending. For with this 1974 release, we arrive at the seventh and final “portmanteau” film released by Amicus Productions, the little British horror studio that was, in ’74, just about to abandon the genre (the […]
According to a certain strand of criticism that has existed since the early 1960s, the biggest single shortcoming with Ingmar Bergman is that he is fundamentally apolitical. His international heyday exactly overlapped with a moment of heightened political activism around the world from artists of every medium, much of it oriented in opposition to the […]
