It is a strange thing to say of a director’s unmistakably intimate, personal, and passionate film that it also feels like he’s working in an unusually minor mode. But I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better way of quickly describing the very curious ambivalence at the heart of The Hand of God, which […]
It was, I believe, my father who introduced me to the phrase “he thinks his shit don’t stink” as a pithy way of denigrating the kind of person who is arrogantly convinced of their righteous infallibility. I will not say of writer-director Adam McKay, and his newest film, Don’t Look Up, that he thinks his […]
“These two unrelated movies constitute a trend” is not by any stretch of the imagine my favorite bad habit in film criticism. Yet it seems awfully hard not to notice that December 2021 has borne witness to two different movies made by A-list Oscar-winning directors that are both technically new adaptations of non-movie media, but […]
Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac feels like it would be a perfect candidate for being turned into a musical, and indeed it would appear that exactly that transformation has happened, multiple times, in both French and English. So arguably there’s actually nothing special about the new film Cyrano, except that it is, as […]
Twelve entries is quite a good run, but I think at long last, with Witchcraft XII: In the Lair of the Serpent, the Witchcraft series finally found its bottom. This is recklessly optimistic, I know, but every other time one of the releases in the franchise was much, much worse than its predecessors, it felt […]
When I told Tim I would like to start doing some Bollywood reviews for Alternate Ending, he practically pushed me out the door with a broom and told me to get going, chop chop. So here is the first of what will hopefully be a long line of reviews that expand AE even further into […]
Benedetta, a film about lesbian nuns directed by Paul Verhoven, is a very different thing than “a film about lesbian nuns directed by Paul Verhoeven” can even start to suggest. One of the most shocking, provocative things about it is that it puts almost no effort into being provocative or shocking. It satirically targets the […]
Since the moment that the first Resident Evil film appeared way back in 2002, that movie and its five sequels have come under attack from fans of the video game series, on the charges of reckless infidelity to the source material. To be entirely fair, they also have come under attack from critics and audiences […]
The new film adaptation of the 1957 stage musical West Side Story has an exceptionally high “why did you feel the need to make this” bar to clear. Because it’s also, in the public imagination if not in the most precisely literal sense, a remake of the 1961 film musical West Side Story, one of […]
A movie as bad as House of Gucci shouldn’t be as bad as House of Gucci. If you follow me. Basically, if you were to select the right moments – the ones in the film’s shockingly weird trailers, for example – you would be 100% convinced that you had before you a remarkable piece of […]
If I may risk dipping my toes into The Discourse, I would like to offer a thought. It is possible for two things to be simultaneously true: first, that smartphones and social media have absolutely turned the brains of everyone under the age of 45 into mashed bananas, and left us a society unable to […]
West Side Story, the highest-grossing film of 1961 and the winner of that year’s Best Picture Oscar (one of a whopping ten awards it one at that ceremony; only three films have ever won more*), has been a duly-anointed classic for so long – pretty much since 1961, really – that it can be hard […]
