Woe betide anybody who sits down in front of Moonage Daydream expecting to learn something concrete about David Bowie. That’s not a criticism, let me hasten to clarify—expository documentaries generally leave me wishing that I’d read a book or lengthy article on the subject instead, and I was drawn to this film less as a […]
Let’s at least give Don’t Worry Darling this much credit: it’s easy to imagine this being a much drearier and more haranguing social satire than it is. In large part, this is because the film has such an extraordinarily hard time keeping any of its many ideas straight, or developing any of them to any […]
To wrap up the summer movie season, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a wide-release film from the last few weeks. From August 19: one of the specific things that the particular species of bipedal apes commonly […]
25 years ago, Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke mightily pissed off some horror-loving cinephiles of my acquaintance with a nasty piece of work called Funny Games. (Just to pour salt in the wound, Haneke remade it almost shot-for-shot a decade later, in English, enticing the unwary with stars Naomi Watts and Tim Roth.) Everyone agreed that […]
It’s very easy to look at a movie and declare it “a labor of love” whether you actually know that to be the case or not, but for Pearl, there’s no doubt about it. Literally the fact that it exists at all is the proof that it was a labor of love, and that co-writers […]
There should never have been any sequels to the 1960 film Psycho, of course. It is not at all a perfect film (that godawful psychiatrist scene at the end is more than sufficient to guarantee that), but it is a fully-realized film, and one whose profound impact of the movie landscape is maybe literally impossible […]
Technically speaking, Confess, Fletch is the third feature adapted from Gregory McDonald’s popular series of novels (published between 1974 and 1986) about Irwin Maurice Fletcher, occasional investigative reporter and near-constant wiseass. As far as any true Fletch fan is concerned, however, we’re starting fresh here, because the two movies starring Chevy Chase in the title […]
To wrap up the summer movie season, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a wide-release film from the last few weeks. From August 12: Mack & Rita explores the comedic potentials of what happens when a woman […]
Barbarian is the kind of film whose boosters (of which I don’t entirely count myself one, though I think it’s a pretty easy recommendation for anyone with a more than passing interest in grotty horror-thrillers) would have it be the case that even mentioning that it has a story constitutes an unforgivable spoiler, or some […]
A review requested by Carl, 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! It is highly likely that 1999’s The Story of Us would inevitably bring to mind the once-in-a-generation classic […]
For those who don’t follow Indian cinema, Brahmāstra: Part One – Shiva is kind of a big deal. It’s a film that has been in production for over five years (in the process becoming the most expensive Hindi language film ever produced), part of a promised fantasy-action trilogy that is intended to expand even further into […]
Hang around long enough as a cinephile and you’ll eventually watch significant filmmakers fade into irrelevance. If you’ve only gotten the bug sometime in the past 15 years, you may be largely unfamiliar with Neil LaBute, who’d once briefly appeared to be a major new filmmaker; after grabbing attention with 1997’s In the Company of […]
