Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Every single review of The Zone of Interest, the fourth feature film directed by Jonathan Glazer, at some point will reference the subtitle of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil. Some reviews will mention it in the context of this being a very powerful illustration of Arendt’s most famous idea. […]

If you have set yourself the task of making a movie prequel to probably Roald Dahl’s best-known children’s book, 1964’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and what you are actually doing is making a prequel to the 1971 film based on that book, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but six of one, half-dozen of […]

A review requested by Carl, 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! There’s nothing unusual about two films with an unplanned resonance with each other coming out at about the […]

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! We have absolutely no evidence that this is actually how it went down (arguably, we have evidence to […]

A review requested by Dave, 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! History recalls 1983’s Local Hero, the third feature written and directed by Bill Forsyth, as the inspiration for […]

Categories: british cinema, comedies

I think it goes without saying that the best answer to the question, “what do you would the right way to remake Kurosawa Akira’s gorgeous 1952 melodrama Ikiru?” would be “I hope you die in a fire”, but setting that aside, Living is actually pretty good. The biggest problem with it, by far, is that […]

In a world of endless sequels and remakes, it’s easy to lose sight of a less common but more valuable phenomenon—what one might call the spiritual successor. These are films that take their inspiration from, and hence owe their very existence to, a single ancestor, but are not pointless carbon copies; characters get substantially reimagined, […]

In a long career as Hollywood royalty that has generally swung between the none-too-distant poles of “affably, watchably mediocre” and “tediously mediocre”, Ron Howard’s best film as a director has long been 1995’s Apollo 13, and I would be inclined to say that it’s not really a close race. I’m not quite going to say […]

It’s incredibly difficult to discuss Flux Gourmet without starting at “this is a film by Peter Strickland”, which isn’t even the most useful way into the film, in this case. One of Strickland’s two biggest identifying characteristics doesn’t apply here: while all three of Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy, and In Fabric (his […]

In a career spanning 45 years and nine feature-length films, the great Terence Davies, one of Great Britain’s finest living directors, has made only three kinds of films: autobiographies, wordy literary adaptations, and biopics of poets. His newest feature, Benediction, is sort of all three of these things in one body. Officially speaking, it’s only […]

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! Tommy, the 1975 feature film adaptation of the 1969 concept album by The Who, is an erratic, garish […]

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. In the week now ending: Downton Abbey: A New Era is a movie with a script by Julian Fellowes, focused on […]