Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Every week this summer, 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 one of the weekend’s wide releases. Last week: David Cronenberg, in his years as an elder statesman of cinema, has taken the new Crimes of the Future […]

Jacques Audiard directing a film from a script he co-wrote with Céline Sciamma is one of the biggest-name mash-ups that French cinema is capable of producing right now (they had a third co-writer, Léa Mysius, and the script was adapted from short stories by Adrian Tomine, but from the perspective of the art house movie […]

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 […]

Benedetta, a film about lesbian nuns directed by Paul Verhoven, is a very different thing than “a film about lesbian nuns directed by Paul Verhoeven” can even start to suggest. One of the most shocking, provocative things about it is that it puts almost no effort into being provocative or shocking. It satirically targets the […]

A paradox about Titane, and not the only one, is that it almost certainly didn’t deserve to win the 2021 Palme d’Or, and also it’s extremely cool and exciting that it did so. The Palme is probably the major film award with the best batting average, quality-wise, so I don’t mean to impugn it in […]

One does not expect, in the 2020s, to just up and get a new feature film directed by Tsai Ming-liang. His tenth and most recent, Stray Dogs came out in 2013, itself after a four-year delay following 2009’s Face, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to suppose that the strain of life and cinema had just […]

A review requested by Gavin, 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! Saint Sebastian, who according to tradition died a martyr in 288 (he was clubbed to death, having miraculously […]

Pablo Larraín, probably the most prominent Chilean director in the world right now, has at this point directed eight feature films. Most of these are period films; most of these are explicitly about politics; most of them have a certain performative sense of irony. His eighth and newest film, Ema falls into not one of […]

Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like Kate Winslet has been gone for a very long time. She has, of course, been showing up in movies and TV shows, lots of them. But for about a dozen years following Sense and Sensibility in 1995, it felt like she was a pretty reliable middlebrow fixture […]

For what would prove to be the final film of his self-imposed exile in West Germany, Ingmar Bergman wanted to finally honor the cinema of his host country, rather than keep making quasi-Swedish chamber dramas as if nothing had changed but the address of his studio. And indeed, that is very much what he ended […]

These days, when the 1967 Stimulantia comes up – something it is powerfully unlikely to ever do – it’s almost certainly in the context of being the one anthology film that Ingmar Bergman contributed a segment to, right in the heart of his international heyday in the 1960s (it nestles in his career during the […]

The Silence is a film of negation. The first words spoken –  the first of not very many, at that – are a declaration of ignorance and meaninglessness. A boy of ten or eleven, Johan (Jörgen Lindström) points to a sign written in an unfamiliar language, asking, “Vad betyder det?” (What does that mean?). Off-camera […]