One should be careful in going overboard with praise for director Stuart Gordon, who was a fallible mortal like the rest of us – I have seen both Robot Jox and Fortress, I am well aware that the man could fuck up. But still, listen to this fun fact and tell me the man wasn’t […]
You have perhaps heard of The Godfather. It is a three-hour movie about the Mafia, released in 1972 by a studio that had been losing money at a steady clip, directed by an up-and-coming filmmaker whose last film had been a major flop (he was hired, in large part because the desperate studio knew that […]
There is, I think, an excellent possibility that there is not a worse film with better cinematography than Cool as Ice, the 1991 film where Janusz Kamiński was given more or less an entirely free hand to do literally whatever he wanted. And oh my word, did he ever run with that. View it as […]
I won’t go so far as to say that there’s nothing that can prepare you for Tekkonkinkreet, the 2006 film that, among its many traits, was the first significant Japanese-produced animated feature directed by a non-Japanese person (the man with that honor was Los Angeles-born Michael Arias, who got his start in visual effects and […]
By 2001, Joel & Ethan Coen had already written and directed a free adaptation of Dashiell Hammett in the form of 1990’s Miller’s Crossing, and a riff on Raymond Chandler in the form of 1998’s The Big Lebowski. So of course they’d have to do their version of a James M. Cain story, to wrap up […]
The eighth film made by Joel & Ethan Coen, 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? also has the distinction of being their first full-on no-two-ways-about-it major studio production. 20th Century Fox had distributed Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, and Barton Fink, but the financing and production of those films was still closer to a conventional indie […]
As we all know, On the Waterfront exists because film and theater legend Elia Kazan, when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in April 1952, complied by naming the names of eight people who had, at one point in the 1930s, been card-carrying Communists. This cost him many of his friends, and he wanted […]
Joel & Ethan Coen have made a career-long habit of never repeating themselves two films in a row – maybe to keep themselves entertained, or looking to keep themselves from being pigeonholed, I don’t know. Even so, there’s nothing in their career that compares to how hard they switched things up after the great success […]
Author’s note: I’m going to be treating this like you already know the story, and after a quarter of a century, you really ought to. Still, probably best to hold off on reading this if you haven’t seen the film – and also, I strongly urge you to see the film. There are so many […]
A review requested by WBTN, 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! Francis Ford Coppola’s popular reputation lies almost exclusively on the four films he made during the 1970s, every […]
With their first feature, 1984’s Blood Simple, filmmaking brothers Joel & Ethan Coen proved that they were talented as hell, and worth paying attention to. But it’s simply not possible to see in that film the seeds for their second feature, 1987’s Raising Arizona, which is the point at which they became The Coen Brothers, among […]
It’s right around the 14-minute mark in 1984’s Blood Simple that Joel & Ethan Coen first become “the Coen Brothers”. It’s a short, single-take scene set in bar, and the scene starts all the way at the far end of the bar from the characters we actually care about. So the camera tracks forward, right […]
