The Death of Louis XIV certainly does live up to its title. The newest entry in cinema’s third-oldest genre*, the “watch a monarch die” biopic (born with 1895’s The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots), starts at close to the exact moment that Louis XIV, King of France (Jean-Pierre Léaud) begins to suffer from the […]
A review requested by Travis Neeley, 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! In the interest of honesty, I’ll confess immediately that I have no expertise at all on the […]
Lost in Paris is beguiling as all hell, and I would in a pinch call it the most satisfying feature comedy released in the United States in 2017, though that’s not a particularly competitive field. Still and all: beguiling. It’s a featherweight romantic comedy full of many tiny surprises and absolutely no big ones, and […]
The opening ten minutes of BPM (Beats per Minute) (an inscrutably poor re-titling of the original French title, which translates as 120 Beats per Minute) are among the most bracing and original in any movie I’ve seen in 2017. Before we’re given a minute to situate ourselves, we’re dumped into the backstage area where a […]
I cannot tell you about the moments in Faces Places that brought me the most happiness. This is partially because those moments are clustered in the film’s last 30 minutes, and they are far too wonderful in their little surprises for me to dare spoil them. This is partially, also, because they are so pure […]
A previous version of this review appeared at the Film Experience. If one ever gets to feeling (as I routinely do) that American animation is in a rut from which it will never emerge, or at least not until the back side of some terrible economic collapse, there’s a simple enough solution: look to Europe. […]
A review requested by Chere Evans, 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! The word “weird” is among the vaguest and therefore least useful terms in art criticism. It is […]
When they write the histories of the cannibal film, many years from now, they’ll have to save a whole chapter for Raw. It’s a right marvel all the way around: it has the unapologetic, unblinking gore of the all the most sordid examples of Italian cannibal films from the late ’70s and early ’80s,* but […]
I was all set. I had this whole thing I was going to do where I complained about how the Weinstein Company took what was self-evidently not a very great film in the form of the French animated film Ballerina, and made it even worse in remolding it for the U.S. market as Leap!, but […]
Before I go on and on about how Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is such a good example of the transporting cinematic power of unbridled spectacle, so profoundly, importantly great at creating a brand new world for our eyeballs to soak up and our brains to play in, that it almost completely […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: if we are being strict with words, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is closer to the […]
A review requested by Allison Tooey, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The thing we should first know about the 2011 animated feature film Tales of the Night is that it’s not really a feature film. Or from 2011. Instead, it’s a package film made up of six […]
