Tár, the official “movie for people who care about challenging cinema for adults” movie in the mix for the 2022 awards season, and writer-director Todd Field’s return to filmmaking after 16 years, is the most perfect tabula rasa I have encountered in a long time. I have had conversations and read reviews stating, in essence, […]
For its first hour or so, Holy Spider, the third feature from Iranian-born Danish expat Ali Abbasi (Border), depicts misogynistic violence along two parallel tracks. One narrative thread follows a female journalist, Arezoo Rahimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), who’s just arrived in Mashhad, located at the northeast corner of Iran, to report on a series of murders […]
In the 2001 masterpiece of big-budget studio fluff Ocean’s Eleven, George Clooney and Julia Roberts co-starred as bickering ex-spouses, whose sharp-tongued acrimony was so clever and adorable and spiked with gorgeous movie star energy that one can barely stand the crashing force of all the chemistry between them. So we know they can do better […]
Some films that are marketed with an emphasis on how much of a “passion project” they were for the people involved are obviously bullshitting us. This is not the case with Black Adam. That this film, the first big-screen adventure for the mid-tier DC Comics supervillain-cum-antihero, is a long-gestating passion project for star Dwayne Johnson […]
Declaring Dark Glasses to be the best film directed by the legendary Italian horror master Dario Argento in 20 years is almost literally meaningless. First and foremost, he hasn’t made anything for the last ten of those years, since 2012’s dreadful Dracula 3D threatened to be the final film of his illustrious career. And that came […]
I can hear you right now. You’re asking, “They made a remake of Terror Train?” That is, if you even remember the movie Terror Train existed in the first place. It’s a minor 1980 classic notable for its setting (a train), its holiday theme (New Year’s Eve), its star (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a couple notables […]
Consider this a high compliment: It would have taken me quite some time, had I not been aware of the fact in advance, to recognize All That Breathes as a documentary. The film’s first shot consists of a lengthy, slow track across a nighttime landscape in an as-yet-unidentified locale—one that appears to be urban or […]
The horror anthology franchise is a very strange beast. In English language cinema, there are really only two of note: The Creepshow trilogy (which was followed by a web series and a Shudder streaming series – and that is really just a gussied-up web series, if you think about it) and the V/H/S films*. At this point, V/H/S […]
A review requested by Mandy, 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! 1991’s Night on Earth is a crucial pivot point in the offbeat and peculiar career of the offbeat […]
Rosaline, in every way, almost gets there. It almost pulls off an anachronistic attitude that feels sly and purposeful, rather than tonally muddled and wannabe-hip. It almost gives its heroine enough personality to evoke a whole human being. It almost indulges in a fun, twisty romantic sabotage plot; then, turning the tables, it almost makes […]
Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is not a good film, which comes as absolutely no surprise whatsoever. It is surprising, perhaps, that it isn’t much worse – and “much worse” is, to be fair, in the eye of the beholder. Nothing could be more understandable than somebody subjecting themselves to this film and declaring it an unmitigated […]
Unlike the other major horror franchises, the Halloween series has made room for so many mutually-incompatible narratives – there are five different branches of continuity distributed between thirteen films – that there’s a sense in which “this isn’t ‘really’ a Halloween film” is sort of an empty thing to say. Heck, the 1982 release Halloween […]
