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 […]

A review requested by Jonny Mugwump, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. At the risk of immediately sounding like the absolute dumbest motherfucker imaginable, I think there’s a very good reason it’s called Picnic at Hanging Rock, not Disappearance at Hanging Rock. Along with L’avventura, this is one of cinema’s […]

It’s surely easy to overstate how groundbreaking the film Koyaanisqatsi was at the time of its enthusiastically-received 1982 premiere and its massive-hit-by-cult-film-standards commercial release in 1983, but I would be much more wary of diminishing it than puffing it up. Ever since it was young, an honest reckoning with the techniques and aesthetics of this […]

In 2017, John Wick: Chapter 2 opened by showing footage from the 1924 Buster Keaton comedy Sherlock Jr., one of the greatest stunt-driven movies of all time, and the gesture was an obvious, swaggering brag: “what we’re up to here is just as good as Keaton”. And for the next two hours, director Chad Stahelski […]

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 […]

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 […]

The game I enjoy playing so much, “what happens when Major International Film Auteur X moves outside of their native country and native language for the first time?” has been given a particularly unexpected pair of answers by Kore-eda Hirokazu, the Japanese creator of so many feather-soft stories of people on the edge of the […]

Bones and All, the seventh feature film directed by Luca Guadagnino, is kind of about cannibalism, and this is where it gets itself into trouble. No film should be “kind of” about cannibalism. Some subjects just don’t allow for half measures. You should never walk out of a film whose protagonists are cannibals – bisexual […]

The Fabelmans is full of striking images. It is, in a sense, a film about striking images. Perhaps the most striking of all, to me, comes somewhat far into the movie – it is maybe even a spoiler to talk about it. But I’m not sure how much you can “spoil” The Fabelmans: the story […]

A review requested by Kevin, 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 later years, Film Twitter has (in its Film Twitter way) decided that M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 feature […]

A review requested by Michael, 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! “Eraserhead is about David Lynch’s terrified disgust at the thought of being a father” is such a well-worn […]

Insofar as we should always sit up and take notice when a major film director produces an obviously intimate and personal work, then yes, we should absolute bow in the direction of Licorice Pizza. The ninth feature directed by Paul Thomas Anderson – who is, by any measure, a major director – isn’t a work […]