If there is one great huge problem with Forgotten, and I rather feel like “problem” is a bit of a leading word, it’s that the film is nakedly, overwhelmingly anxious to remind you of Oldboy. And surely, Oldboy is a wonderful movie, so that’s an understandable impulse, but we’re still stuck with a film that, […]
Depending on what you’re watching for, on a scene-by-scene basis The Villainess might be anything from a contender for 2017’s most powerfully image-driven film to a frustrating, confusing an alienating affair of watching non-characters maneuver through a non-plot while gushing jets of blood. And why I say “scene-by-scene basis”, I really almost mean a “shot-by-shot […]
There is absolutely no reason for the wonderful 2015 short World of Tomorrow to have needed a sequel. But we got one, and it is equally wonderful. World of Tomorrow, Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts is a fucking miracle: it manages to succeed entirely as a follow-up to World of Tomorrow while […]
A review requested by Andrew Johnson, 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, in principle, the job of the movie critic to be objective, or at least to […]
I will say this, and say it sincerely: Rat Film is definitely a weird film in all the right ways. On paper, director-writer Theo Anthony’s documentary argues a basic-unto-banal chain of causes and effects: systemic racism keeps black communities in the United States mired in poverty, urban centers that are mired in poverty tend to […]
A review requested by Tristan Frayling, with thanks for 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! Like many a film, Go feels like it could only possibly have ever been made in the […]
It would be a blatant exaggeration to call Dunkirk an experimental film, or any such thing. But for a film with a $150 million price tag that’s been positioned as the biggest superhero-free Warner Bros. tentpole of 2017, it does just about as much experimenting as it could possibly dare. The film, on paper, is […]
There are many people ready for this strange, essayistic phase of Terrence Malick’s career to be over, and I get that, though it’s not like we’re inundated with associatively-edited mood pieces. Three films out in the entire world in a five-year period doesn’t seem like too many to deal with. But anyway, Malick has been […]
A review requested by Steve T, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There are, in the broadest possible sense, two epochs of the English-language romantic comedy. One was the age of the great screwball comedies, which ended during World War II. The second was the era of of […]
The opening credits of Nocturnal Animals feature several obese women, naked but for drum majorette hats, dancing in slow motion. Nothing that resembles this ever happens anywhere else in the whole movie. I can think of a few different explanations for why director Tom Ford would have seen fit to include this, none of which […]
Only a director as reliably extraordinary as Jim Jarmusch could make a movie as sensitive and heartbreaking as Paterson and have it feel vaguely disappointing. I cannot speak for any other fans of the director’s work, but what I like most about his now twelve narrative features is how the best of them seriously interrogate […]
Arrival is one of the most entirely ideas-based sci-fi films that I have ever seen; even its late turn from linguistics to moral philosophy is squarely in the realm of the intellect, and while it is in its own way heart-rending, that way is all mixed up in an impressively dense matrix of theories of […]
