A review requested by Martha, 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 aren’t too many formulations that make me instantaneously suspicious of a movie more than A) a story […]
2016’s The Boy isn’t a very good movie, but for a horror movie released in January during the 2010s, it’s pretty darned good. For a January horror movie directed by William Brent Bell, who perpetrated 2012’s inhumanly bad The Devil Inside, it’s an I’ll-be-god-damned miracle sent down from the Lord Christ on fucking high. More […]
Pablo Larraín, probably the most prominent Chilean director in the world right now, has at this point directed eight feature films. Most of these are period films; most of these are explicitly about politics; most of them have a certain performative sense of irony. His eighth and newest film, Ema falls into not one of […]
Every film director in the history of the medium has made, or will have made, their final film. Most of them scrape out some dumb nonsense, the kind of half-assed project that a fading, aging artist can get financed. The lucky ones are able to do so at least semi-knowingly, ending their career on a […]
For what would prove to be the final film of his self-imposed exile in West Germany, Ingmar Bergman wanted to finally honor the cinema of his host country, rather than keep making quasi-Swedish chamber dramas as if nothing had changed but the address of his studio. And indeed, that is very much what he ended […]
One cannot grapple with 1978 Autumn Sonata, not in any of the ways it’s doing pretty much anything, without going straight to the most blazingly obvious. This is, before it is anything else, the single collaboration between the two most internationally famous representatives of the Swedish film industry,* the one where iconic AAA-level Hollywood movie […]
It is tempting, easy, and maybe even accurate to describe Shirley, director Josephine Becker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins’s adaptation of Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel, as a biopic of Shirley Jackson. But it is not by any stretch of the imagination an accurate one. To be scrupulously fair, it does not pretend to be; it’s […]
As we all know, Ingmar Bergman directed two television miniseries that were also cut down to feature length for theatrical release: Scenes from a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander. What is surely less-known is that, in between the two of them, he made another one. This is Face to Face, which aired on Swedish television […]
By Jaysus, is Wild Mountain Thyme a great piece of shite. Sure, and never did I see a film about Ireland and the Irish that was so desperately addicted to the most revolting cartoon stereotypes – in comparison The Quiet Man looks like a documentary, Waking Ned looks like guttural neorealism, and that episode of […]
The best thing ever made for television, anywhere in the world, is the 10-part miniseries Dekalog from 1988 – I think this is maybe even objectively true. The second-best thing ever made for television, anywhere in the world, now that’s where we can start to have arguments. For me, I think it’s a dead heat […]
First things first: I have an enormously hard time imagining the viewer who would be surprised by literally anything that happens in Run outside of its final scene, and that’s as much as anything because it’s final scene is a charming but dopey epilogue that feels tacked on in an especially ungainly way. But the […]
J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis came out at a perfect time to be glommed onto by political and cultural commentators from every corner who desperately needed something that could shore up their Grand Narrative about what happened in American politics that year. I myself haven’t […]
