Erich Maria Remarque’s undying 1928 anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front has the uncommon fortune for a major literary classic to have been adapted into a major cinematic classic, and this happened almost immediately: the U.S.-produced adaptation that would go on to win the Academy Award for Outstanding Production (i.e., Best Picture) at […]
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: at a sufficiently far remove, Thor: Love and Thunder is ultimately based on the legends and mythology of Northern […]
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: at a sufficiently far remove, Thor: Love and Thunder is ultimately based on the legends and mythology of Northern […]
A review requested by Jack, 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 NeverEnding Story comes attached to a very important fun fact: it was, at the time of its […]
The opening sequence of Stowaway, a new science fiction thriller by director Joe Penna that’s much heavier on the “science” than “thriller”, is a top-notch bit of space travel filmmaking that calls to mind all the best examples of the form from Apollo 13 to First Man; the last sequence is ginned-up sentimental horseshit that […]
For what would prove to be the final film of his self-imposed exile in West Germany, Ingmar Bergman wanted to finally honor the cinema of his host country, rather than keep making quasi-Swedish chamber dramas as if nothing had changed but the address of his studio. And indeed, that is very much what he ended […]
One cannot grapple with 1978 Autumn Sonata, not in any of the ways it’s doing pretty much anything, without going straight to the most blazingly obvious. This is, before it is anything else, the single collaboration between the two most internationally famous representatives of the Swedish film industry,* the one where iconic AAA-level Hollywood movie […]
Sometimes, consensus has it so spot-on that it’s downright gratifying to agree with what everybody else has already said on the matter. To wit: yes indeed, 1977’s The Serpent’s Egg is the worst movie Ingmar Bergman ever directed, finally toppling his 1950 make-work misfire This Can’t Happen Here from its 27-year reign of terror, if […]
A review requested by Kelleson, 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! “Adult animation” is a category so broad as to be meaningless,* but I bet if I just put […]
Anna Seghers’s 1944 novel Transit is a ripped-from-the-headlines tale of the paranoid life of refugees in Nazi-occupied Marseille in 1942, telling the story of the constant feeling of danger and despair on the part of people clustered in the last escape hatch from an increasingly locked-down Europe. Christian Petzold’s 2018 adaptation of the novel is… […]
Diane Kruger won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for In the Fade, and that’s pretty much exactly right. I don’t know if there was or wasn’t a better performance at that festival this year, but I do know that this is the kind of film that, if you’re involved in festival […]
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 […]
