Tár, the official “movie for people who care about challenging cinema for adults” movie in the mix for the 2022 awards season, and writer-director Todd Field’s return to filmmaking after 16 years, is the most perfect tabula rasa I have encountered in a long time. I have had conversations and read reviews stating, in essence, […]
Let’s at least give Don’t Worry Darling this much credit: it’s easy to imagine this being a much drearier and more haranguing social satire than it is. In large part, this is because the film has such an extraordinarily hard time keeping any of its many ideas straight, or developing any of them to any […]
It’s very easy to look at a movie and declare it “a labor of love” whether you actually know that to be the case or not, but for Pearl, there’s no doubt about it. Literally the fact that it exists at all is the proof that it was a labor of love, and that co-writers […]
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! It is highly likely that 1999’s The Story of Us would inevitably bring to mind the once-in-a-generation classic […]
Studio 4°C doesn’t have the same name recognition of the best-known and best-loved Japanese animation studios in the West, which I imagine is at least in part because its best and boldest work is at this point well over a decade in the past. But it have some irresistibly interesting credits to their name, with […]
Dying is one of the only two entirely universal human experiences (the other is being born), which would in principal make it one of the great subjects of art, but I guess it’s understandable why it isn’t. Death is, after all, depressing. It frequently involves physical suffering. It is something we don’t like to think […]
The genre in which the intermittently great American filmmaker Richard Linklater most consistently demonstrates his greatness (outside of “Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke walk around a city having epistemological debates”) must surely be “Richard Linklater revisits a very particular slice of Richard Linklater’s own life”. And as far as that goes, he’s perhaps never gone […]
Even by the highly dubious standards of Oscarbait biopics whose commercial and awards campaign both hang insistently on one single performance and literally nothing else whatsoever about the film, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a pretty cruddy movie. Adapted from a 2000 documentary of the same title by screenwriter Abe Sylvia and director Michael […]
Setting aside the question the question of whether the end results are actually worth it – my answer would be “mostly, yes” – one must give After Yang the unhesitating credit that it is a complete work of narrative cinema, in which every element of the image and sound has been carefully positioned to work […]
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 […]
When a formidable artist makes a point of working away from all of his most overt strengths, it demands that we pay some especially close attention. I say this even though I’m not sure that Parallel Mothers quite counts as Pedro Almodóvar deliberately working away from his overt strengths. But I would be inclined to […]
Also check out Chris’s interview with Iuli Gerbase, writer-director of The Pink Cloud As The Pink Cloud opens, on-screen text states “this film was written in 2017 and shot in 2019. Any resemblance to actual events is purely coincidental.” Knowing nothing going into the film, I thought it was strange to include comments like that […]
