1953’s Summer with Monika, Ingmar Bergman’s twelfth feature film as director, was also the film with which he first found major international success, though that success had very little to do with critical recognition of his talent. Rather, it’s because Summer with Monika had what was, at the time, a groundbreaking depiction of nudity, and […]
On the one hand, Midnight Cowboy is exactly the kind of film that I wish they would try more often, and that they’d meet with this kind of success whenever they tried it. Here we have a film with unabashedly experimental editing, polished and tidied a bit for mainstream consumption of course; we also have […]
The knowledge that the second feature by Nicolas Pesce, who directed The Eyes of My Mother, is an adaptation of a novel by Murakami Ryu, who wrote Audition, should be enough to give absolutely even the most stalwart among us pause for a moment. For those are two monumentally fucked-up, bleak stories about the depths […]
Want another opinion? Check out Conrado’s thoughts on the film! A movie about the love life of a British monarch, released during the last six weeks of the calendar year, directed by an Oscar-nominated screenwriter who also has a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee to his credit, starring in the three roles a trio […]
The one good thing about living in some godforsaken quadrant of the country where the luscious awards-season heavy hitter Call Me by Your Name took forever and then some to open is that, by the time I had my chance to catch up with it, it had already moved from “rapturous praise” to “mild backlash”, […]
A review requested by John Taylor, 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! My God, is it possible I’ve been at this reviewing thing for more than 12 years, and […]
The number of things that Beach Rats does that would ordinarily annoy the hell out of me is basically all of it. And yet. Somehow, the precise ratio of ugly-ass indie film cinematography, meandering narrative focus, and pointedly smudgy adolescent self-discovery is managed by writer-director Eliza Hittman (making her second feature; I have not seen […]
First things first: the sheer weirdness of watching a director whose work up till now has all been characterised by a glacial sheen of emotional remove from her characters and their behavior retelling a story of hothouse Southern Gothic sexuality during the U.S. Civil War – and maintaining that glacial quality! – is all it […]
Personal Shopper was booed at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival en route to winning the award for Best Director for Olivier Assayas, both of which are exactly right. I would be inclined to call it not merely a great film, but a very great film, and comfortably the best thing Assayas has directed since 2002’s […]
The problem with with The Handmaiden is that it starts out perfect. Just perfect, I mean, everything I want a movie to be is in there: utterly lush, can’t-stand-it-how-pretty costumes and production design that bring pre-WWII Korea to life with elegance and great vividness while also locking the film into a visual schema based on […]
A review requested by Alex, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The line on 2010’s Attenberg, established during its 2012 U.S. release in my hearing, but possibly older, is that it is a warped and weird and delectably perverse entry into the 21st Century’s tradition of demented Greek […]
The first challenge in talking about The Duke of Burgundy is describing it. I think it is a tremendously great film; but the sort of people who would be most likely to agree with me aren’t the people who’d be most easily seduced by hearing the basic details of its scenario, and the sort of […]
