I will say this about Five Nights at Freddy’s, an extremely unlikable piece of shit movie whose enormous, instantaneous box-office success has filled me with the gloomy suspicion that we’re staring down the gun barrel of a new epoch where the only movies that become hits are the ones that can  be turned into memes: […]

My hope for The Pope’s Exorcist before I watched it was that Russell Crowe’s instantly-legendary spicy meat-a-ball of an “Italian” accent would remain amusing throughout the film’s 103-minute length. This was akin to hoping, upon starting a trip to Yosemite, that you’d see some large trees: you’d get what you wanted even more than you […]

Once Within a Time is on the one hand, a film that I feel compelled to praise for being unsafe and experimental, especially since it had every reason not to be: director Godfrey Reggio is an octogenarian these days, after all, and in the year of our Lord 2023, when the primary mode of so […]

A review requested by STinG, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. If there is such a thing as “objective” quality in cinema, then Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is objectively a bad movie. Fortunately, there is no such thing as objective quality in cinema. Sure, you could point to lots […]

It’s surely easy to overstate how groundbreaking the film Koyaanisqatsi was at the time of its enthusiastically-received 1982 premiere and its massive-hit-by-cult-film-standards commercial release in 1983, but I would be much more wary of diminishing it than puffing it up. Ever since it was young, an honest reckoning with the techniques and aesthetics of this […]