Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

I wouldn’t precisely say that Oppenheimer is a Christopher Nolan movie for people who don’t like Christopher Nolan movies. I have people in my life who don’t like Christopher Nolan movies, and they’re still pretty cool towards this one. Maybe the way to put it is that Oppenheimer is the Christopher Nolan movie for people […]

Actually trying to talk about Asteroid City, on any level more involved than “I really liked it, best movie of 2023 so far, 4.5 stars out of 5” (which is, for the record, the short version of this review) feels like willfully stepping into the world’s most obvious trap. There’s a recurring plot point in […]

A review requested by Andrew, 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! Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer was a film ahead of its time. 29 days ahead of its time, […]

A review requested by Valentine, 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! Few films have ever embodied boundless joy at their own creation as much as Chungking Express. It is […]

I think it goes without saying that the best answer to the question, “what do you would the right way to remake Kurosawa Akira’s gorgeous 1952 melodrama Ikiru?” would be “I hope you die in a fire”, but setting that aside, Living is actually pretty good. The biggest problem with it, by far, is that […]

The 2019 anti-mystery Knives Out has a game cast and an interestingly annoying structural conceit, buried (but not very deeply!) below some very dumb social satire and “extremely online” cultural touchstones. It is very much a “fix this one thing, and you’ve really got something here” proposition, but unfortunately, it was written and directed by […]

For its first hour or so, Holy Spider, the third feature from Iranian-born Danish expat Ali Abbasi (Border), depicts misogynistic violence along two parallel tracks. One narrative thread follows a female journalist, Arezoo Rahimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), who’s just arrived in Mashhad, located at the northeast corner of Iran, to report on a series of murders […]

A review requested by Mandy, 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! 1991’s Night on Earth is a crucial pivot point in the offbeat and peculiar career of the offbeat […]

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, […]

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 […]

If I may risk dipping my toes into The Discourse, I would like to offer a thought. It is possible for two things to be simultaneously true: first, that smartphones and social media have absolutely turned the brains of everyone under the age of 45 into mashed bananas, and left us a society unable to […]

I would be tempted to say that Last Night in Soho is the film with which director Edgar Wright proves that he needs somebody else to write his screenplays, but then, didn’t we kind of already know that? Specifically, that he needs Simon Pegg to write his screenplays, or co-write them, anyway: the three Wright-Pegg […]