Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

When a formidable artist makes a point of working away from all of his most overt strengths, it demands that we pay some especially close attention. I say this even though I’m not sure that Parallel Mothers quite counts as Pedro Almodóvar deliberately working away from his overt strengths. But I would be inclined to […]

The 2019 Cannes Film Festival was a real punch in the gut: two of world cinema’s most irrepressible eternal adolescents both suddenly grew up all the way to make Old Man movies. Going by their U.S. release dates, we already had Quentin Tarantino show us his autumnal side with Once Upon a Time …in Hollywood; […]

A review requested by Brennan Klein, 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! By the start of 1988, Pedro Almodóvar had already made six features, including at least one candidate […]

Pedro Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited!… I’m sorry, I can’t even, with that title. Every single Almodóvar film sounds better with its original right name (is not Carne trémula a thousand times sexier-sounding than Live Flesh? Does not Hable con ella flow off the tongue more beautifully than Talk to Her?) but even by those standards, […]

Ever since its premiere at Cannes, The Skin I Live In has attracted the customary divisive reviews that attend to Pedro Almodóvar movies and become a talking point among cinephiles here, there, and everywhere. And in all this, not once have I heard of anybody pointing out the extremely important detail that this is basically […]

Once again, the grand master of Spanish cinema, Pedro Almodóvar, has done his same old thing: a crazed blend of melodrama and cinema history, spun into a twisty pile of psychosexual candy floss. One could be forgiven for wondering if and when he’s ever going to move into a new phase in his career, but […]

I want very badly to call Volver the best film I’ve seen in 2006, and it might actually be the best film I’ve seen in 2006, but the problem is that it’s simultaneously the worst film by Pedro Almodóvar in almost ten years, and somehow, that manages to quash it. The bigotry of high expectations. […]