Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

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 […]

There are both a good idea for a movie and a great idea for a movie tangled up right next to each other inside of Saint Omer, and it is one of the more disappointing developments of the young 2023 movie year (the film is technically a 2022 release in the U.S., but only in […]

A review requested by Hoffnungshaftling, 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! Last Year at Marienbad is to the midcentury European art film as Singin in the Rain is to […]

Athena is representative of a trend in contemporary French cinema that I like to call banlieue porn, films taking place in Paris’ poorer, darker suburbs (les banlieues) and focusing on the lives of crime and violence that their predominantly young, immigrant, and Muslim population purportedly faces every day. Such films walk a fine line between […]

Mathieu Amalric has spent the past three decades forging a career that American moviegoers have experienced in concentrically different subsets. For the widest circle, he was the memorably odd villain in Quantum of Solace, and has occasionally played small supporting roles in Wes Anderson films (The Grand Budapest Hotel; The French Dispatch of the Liberty, […]

The history of cinematic adaptions of Dangerous Liaisons is a strange one. The earliest, to my knowledge, is a French film from 1959 that took place in what was then the present day. This was apparently so misleading that it needed to be rechristened Les Liaisons dangereuses 1960. The next two adaptations were a pair […]

Final Cut (the original French title is Coupez!) puts me in a bit of a sticky situation. The film—which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival—is a remake of the 2017 Japanese film One Cut of the Dead (released in France as Ne coupez pas!), which achieved instant (and deserved) cult classic status. That movie tells […]

Sometimes we Americans get cheated out of a perfect title. Claire Denis’ 14th or 15th solo narrative feature—depends upon whether you want to count 1994’s magnificent, hour-long U.S. Go Home, made for the same remarkable French anthology TV series that gave us Olivier Assayas’ Cold Water and André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds; “Denis’ latest film” would […]

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 […]

On March 16, 1979, Columbia Pictures released The China Syndrome, a cautionary tale (starring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon) about an accident at an American nuclear power plant. Twelve days later, the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania experienced a partial meltdown—still the worst such accident we’ve had, over 40 years […]

Categories: french cinema

Jacques Audiard directing a film from a script he co-wrote with Céline Sciamma is one of the biggest-name mash-ups that French cinema is capable of producing right now (they had a third co-writer, Léa Mysius, and the script was adapted from short stories by Adrian Tomine, but from the perspective of the art house movie […]

It’s always interesting to see where a director goes after making A Big One, and Céline Sciamma certainly hasn’t made A Bigger One than her fourth feature, 2019’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. She also hasn’t made a less characteristic one, which is perhaps why her follow-up, Petite Maman, is such a pointed step […]