Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

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 […]

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 […]

Offscreen space can be an effective tool in movies of all kinds, but horror, more than any other genre, benefits from the suggestion that something terrible may be lurking just beyond the frame’s border. What we can’t see, and thus have to conjure in our imagination, often proves scarier than any razor-toothed monster or hatchet-wielding […]

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 […]

Ascension, the extraordinarily confident feature-length debut of documentarian Jessica Kingdon, manages the seemingly impossible feat of being, all the same time, a thrilling formal object transforming the stuff of real life into abstract visual art; a very angry diatribe about the the human cost of industrialisation in modern China; and a patiently curious, hands-off observation […]

A review requested by Michael, 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! “Eraserhead is about David Lynch’s terrified disgust at the thought of being a father” is such a well-worn […]

In all honesty, just the title of The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) is enough to clue us in that this is going to be a fairly presumptuous motion picture, even without knowing one single other thing about it. Is there a more pretentious punctuation mark, in this context, than […]

Karin’s Face is the very definition of a minor work, a 14-minute photo montage cut together by director Ingmar Bergman and editor Sylvia Ingemarsson by the end of 1983 that didn’t see the light of day until 1986, when it was broadcast on Swedish television. Even so, I have the impression that it is one […]

By almost any conceivable metric, the experimental short film The Dance of the Damned Women/The Condemned Women Dance is the most minor work of Ingmar Bergman’s mature career, and maybe even putting the qualifier “mature” in there is unnecessary. Possibly its single biggest point of significance is that it was the last project the director […]

I will begin by saying that I have seen the film we are about to dig into with three different arrangements of capital letters: Bedevil, BeDevil, and beDevil. I have decided to favor the third, partly because it’s how the title is rendered onscreen, partially because that’s how a couple of art museums refer to […]

Intermittently 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: there are many ways we could plausibly describe Midsommar, one of them being to call it a psychodrama about the […]

Whatever else we can say about it, 24 Frames sure as hell is different. The final film by the late master director Abbas Kiarostami (it premiered a little under a year after his death) would already have my affection just for being such a swerve, albeit a totally in-character swerve. After briefly leaving Iran to […]