Ascension, the extraordinarily confident feature-length debut of documentarian Jessica Kingdon, manages the seemingly impossible feat of being, all the same time, a thrilling formal object transforming the stuff of real life into abstract visual art; a very angry diatribe about the the human cost of industrialisation in modern China; and a patiently curious, hands-off observation […]
Everyone please give a warm welcome to our new contributor, Mike D’Angelo! The first thing to know about Nitram, assuming that you don’t want to replicate the abrupt, mortifying “Oh, duh” moment that I experienced about 12 minutes in, is that the film’s title is Martin spelled backwards. (This only registered when people kept pronouncing […]
The first FBI bug ever planted was against the mob in Chicago in a tailor shop, circa 1956. When Chicago native Graham Moore, who broke into Hollywood by winning an Oscar for his screenwriting debut, The Imitation Game, learned this fact, the story began to write itself. And now, Moore makes his directorial debut with […]
There was a stretch of time around the end of the 2000s and the start of the 2010s where Ti West was pretty much the hippest director of English-language horror films. And then, for absolutely no reason I can confidently point to, he simply wasn’t there any more. His last horror feature was The Sacrament […]
A review requested by Morgan, 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! To call Southland Tales a messy film would be like calling the Battle of Stalingrad a little scuffle, […]
Return to the complete Party Down index First Airdate: April 17, 2009 Written by John Enbom Directed by Fred Savage At “Sin Say Shun Awards Afterparty,” we reach the midpoint of season 1 of Party Down. After two somewhat rocky episodes (by the standards of this show, meaning we weren’t even glancing at anything below “B-” […]
Even by the highly dubious standards of Oscarbait biopics whose commercial and awards campaign both hang insistently on one single performance and literally nothing else whatsoever about the film, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a pretty cruddy movie. Adapted from a 2000 documentary of the same title by screenwriter Abe Sylvia and director Michael […]
Setting aside the question the question of whether the end results are actually worth it – my answer would be “mostly, yes” – one must give After Yang the unhesitating credit that it is a complete work of narrative cinema, in which every element of the image and sound has been carefully positioned to work […]
There is a moment in Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) , about 57 minutes into the 118-minute film, where we see something that is not at all meaningful in and of itself: in the middle of a performance of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” by Gladys Knight & […]
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! Miike Takashi’s whole “thing”, as I suppose most people who know two things about him are aware (if […]
Turning Red represents an auspicious moment for Pixar Animation Studios: its 25th feature-length film, 27 years after inventing the fully-rendered 3-D computer-animated feature with Toy Story. Many of those 25 features are medium-redefining masterpieces, like Toy Story itself, or WALL·E. An unfortunately large number of them, at this point, are thudding mediocrities, like, I am […]
Return to the complete Party Down index First Airdate: April 10, 2009 Written by Rob Thomas Directed by Bryan Gordon “Investors Dinner” is is a transitional episode of Party Down, which is about as fun as it sounds sometimes, but bear with me. It’s following the model that the previous three episodes established, pitting our […]
