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It makes one feel at least slightly like an easy mark to be enormously enthusiastic for The Taste of Things, a movie that feels like it was created in a lab for people with middlebrow tastes who felt “sophisticated” when they watched European art cinema in the 1990s. It’s French. It stars Juliette Binoche. Approximately […]
If you’ve ever thought that the story of how the blessed virgin Mary met and wed the Nazarene carpenter Joseph before the two of them traveled to Bethlehem in time for her to give birth to the Son of God would be a really great subject for a teen romcom… wow. I am concerned about […]
A review requested by Steve, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. There are two particular facts about the 1991 Hong Kong blockbuster Once Upon a Time in China that aren’t immediately obvious to the English-speaking viewer (though they’re easy to come by), and which seem to me very important for […]
Around the time that the Japanese animated feature Inu-oh premiered at the 2021 Venice International Film Festival, its director, Yuasa Masaaki, announced that he’d be taking a break of indeterminate length. Few people can claim to have better earned such a thing: after co-founding the animation studio Science SARU in 2013, Yuasa sank an absolutely […]
The Woman King suffers from only one seriously unanswerable flaw, in my estimation, and it is unfortunately a pretty significant one given what the film is. Namely, its scenes of 19th Century warfare, using a mixture of guns, traditional African tribal weaponry, and what I greatly suspect are some weapons much too fanciful to be […]
Nobody gets anywhere near a high school prom in Corsage, a European co-production that’s primarily Austrian (that’s where its writer-director, Marie Kreutzer, hails from) but has strategically been given a French title certain to confuse American viewers. Why we decided to shift the word’s meaning to “garish flower arrangement clumsily pinned to a young lady’s […]
A review requested by Brian, 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! The costume drama is a genre as old as the movies themselves (The Execution of Mary, Queen of […]
George Miller’s directorial career, which only now arrives at Feature Film #10, 43 years after his debut, consists basically of only weird movies and very weird movies, which should make me pause before saying that Three Thousand Years of Longing is the weirdest, and yet here we are. This is, effectively, his “one for me” […]
In the three-and-a-half decades since the release of the exquisitely focused and gnarly Predator, a high point in the careers of both director John McTiernan and star Arnold Schwarzenegger, that film’s sequels and spin-offs have all been built around complicated, cumbersome variations on the misguided quest, “you wanted more world-building, right? Just tons and tons […]
A note about the critic. While I am a devoted Austen-ite, her final, posthumously published novel Persuasion is not one of her works that particularly captures my imagination, good as it may be. Thus, I am somewhat inoculated against people fucking with it, which probably explains why I’m not illegally downloading a copy of Netflix’s […]
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. This week: at a sufficiently far remove, Thor: Love and Thunder is ultimately based on the legends and mythology of Northern […]
