Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

A review requested by Nik Evans, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Laura is a fucked-up movie about sex. There’s much else to say about it, virtually all of it good, but I think that’s the core of it. Movies released in America in 1944 didn’t have the […]

A review requested by Mark M, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It can no longer be argued, as was once stated with some casual authority, that The Maltese Falcon was “the first” film noir (it was released in October, 1941, more than fours years after You Only […]

A review requested by Kaitlyn B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There are two great cinema masterpieces of American folklore.* Kind of. One of them is The Devil and Daniel Webster AKA All That Money Can Buy, which is based on a 1936 short story that draws […]

The development of film noir, the not-quite-a-genre that wouldn’t be named until after the fact, but which dominated American genre filmmaking in the 15 years after World War II, snakes this way and that, constantly churning and turning out new variations on a theme. But it’s still possible to pin it down on a map […]

A review requested by Chris W, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Out of the Past is not the best film noir ever made, nor does it necessarily include everything that makes the genre its beautifully toxic best self (there’s a distinct lack of urban rot, which I […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/13 & 10/17 World premiere: 12 February, 2014, Berlin International Film Festival It might have been filmed in color; it might have been filmed in China; it might have been filmed decades after of the essential cultural context of the post-WWII America; but other than those little things, Black Coal, […]

As far as nine-years-later sequels go, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For… well, actually it’s pretty fucking awful, since the only other nine-years-later sequels I can think of right off star Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy instead of Mickey Rourke and Jessica Alba, and take as their explicit theme the evolution of culture and […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the https://www.alternateending.com/2014/09/sin-you-went-away.html blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, we return to the charming world of Basin City, where men […]

The Woman on Pier 13 had previews under the title I Married a Communist, and only came into its far less show-offy title when the test audiences rejected it for reasons that probably make perfect sense in the cultural context of 1949, but all it really says to me is that people used to have […]

I’m not the first nor the hundredth nor the thousandth to point out that the explosion of film noir could only have happened in the aftermath of World War II (the genre was established by 1940, and its roots extend back into Germany in the ’20s, but as a phenomenon, it’s a strictly post-war concern). […]

Tarr Béla’s penultimate film (barring an un-retirement), 2007’s The Man from London, is among those movies for which more time is needed: at this writing, nearly seven full years have passed since it prickly, divisive premiere at the Cannes International Film Festival, but that event still hovers over the movie, working in tandem with some […]

With The Killing, we arrive at a very exciting moment in the career of Stanley Kubrick, just shy of his 28th birthday when the film premiered in June, 1956: his third feature and sixth project overall is the very first work of the director’s career that he’d acknowledge existed in later years. That’s not entirely […]