A review requested by David, 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 interests of having some way to start talking about FLCL (pronounced, because why the hell not, […]
You might recall Carrie picking the documentary Searchers as one of her Top 5 most anticipated films on Alternate Ending’s Sundance preview episode. I was inclined to agree with her, which is why I jumped at the chance to check out this particular entry. Speaking as someone who has met and started dating someone entirely […]
Camilla Nielsson’s 2014 Democrats is one of the best documentaries of its kind, an unblinking look at the unsexy, downright ugly deal-making that goes into the compromises that fuel democratic governments, as experienced by politicians in Zimbabwe during that country’s writing of a new constitution that would help it transition to something that could actually […]
Try Harder! is one of the documentaries in competition at Sundance this year. While it’s certainly not the splashiest or most immediately relevant (it has been scooped by Homeroom, which also features high school kids, but focuses on hot-button 2020 pandemic issues), if you’re someone to whom college admissions meant anything at all, it has the […]
Ben Wheatley had, in my estimation, one of the most exciting early runs of any director in the last 20 years: a tonally aggressive feature debut with 2009’s Down Terrace, a genuinely visionary horror film with 2011’s Kill List, a surprising pivot to goofy dark comedy with 2012’s Sightseers, and then a psychedelic freak-out costume […]
CODA is unbearably cloying and contains barely a single narrative beat that isn’t an ossified cliché. Naturally, it has been greeted with rave reviews and a spirited bidding war in the wake of its opening-night premiere at the Sundance Film Festival; elevating sentimental schlock made with little more than the most functional artistry has been […]
Making homages to the gialli, Italy’s cultishly beloved violent, stylish thrillers from the 1970s, has become something of a cottage industry over the last few years, going from a fun celebration of a niche interest to a fairly lazy way to jazz up horror stories with bright colors and cryptic storytelling. It takes more than […]
According to the proverb, “Might oaks from little acorns grow”, and there’s no more knobbly, malformed tree to have painfully scratched its way up from an uglier seed than the Witchcraft franchise, which despite being liked by essentially no-one in the world has racked up enough entries – thirteen when the first run of production […]
Boys State, a documentary by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (who’ve worked together and apart in the world of “let’s look at this thing with a journalist’s eye” PBS-esque documentaries for years; their chief collaboration prior to this was 2014’s celebrated The Overnighters), is interesting or less-interesting for any number of different reasons, but I […]
Kirsten Johnson’s 2016 feature-length documentary Cameraperson is one of the great non-fiction films of the last decade, a personal memoir that doubles as an inquiry into the “meaning” produced by the photographic moving image. For a while, it seems like her follow-up, Dick Johnson Is Dead, will end up splashing in similar thematic waters, as […]
When I was first given the task of reviewing Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself, I wasn’t quite sure how to approach it. This new documentary from Frank Oz is for the most part a recording of storyteller and magician DelGaudio’s titular stage show, specifically the version which ran for 552 performances in New York […]
The Vast of Night, Andrew Patterson’s first feature as a director and one of the most transparent “look what I can do! Hire me for a Star Wars!” efforts to get this high-profile of a release in ages, is like an episode of The Twilight Zone. In case you miss this (which you would not […]
