All the credit in the world to Shia LaBeouf – there’s a phrase that makes me feel unwell just typing it out – for how unfathomably hard it must have been to write and then act in Honey Boy. The film is a barely-disguised autobiography drawing a bright, bold line from LaBeouf’s years as a […]

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! I came in at least a decade too late to be in any way involved with the 1980s […]

I’m not going to go so far as to say that Queen & Slim has the best opening sequence of any 2019 movie, though it’s good enough that that thought flickered across my mind briefly. I am going to say that it has the best opening credits sequence of any 2019 movie, perfectly timed after a […]

Waves is an absolute disaster, morally odious on top of being aesthetically confused. But to its credit, it couldn’t be such a thoroughgoing failure if it wasn’t swinging so hard for the fences. The movie’s failure is absolutely not a failure of ambition: writer-director-editor Trey Edward Shults, making his third feature film, has approached this […]

The 2019 Cannes Film Festival was a real punch in the gut: two of world cinema’s most irrepressible eternal adolescents both suddenly grew up all the way to make Old Man movies. Going by their U.S. release dates, we already had Quentin Tarantino show us his autumnal side with Once Upon a Time …in Hollywood; […]

A review requested by Julia, 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 “movies that unnecessarily fall flat on their asses thanks to just one single massive flaw” hall […]

The question of how to make a good biopic is one that’s been a particular fascination around these parts for a while, and long-time readers have heard my theory that, broadly speaking, there are full biographical movies that start in a person’s youth and end in their old age, and these are typically dull; and […]

Hunting for Freudian symbolism in movies is, I think, almost never a rewarding pursuit, but sometimes you just have to admit when a film slaps you in the face with its enormous engorged cock. And so it is with The Lighthouse, whose titular location is a giant erection of white stone that is routinely framed […]

I won’t call Monos the best film I’ve seen in 2019. That’s a peculiar way to start a review, I know, but I’m doing it in order to make what might even been a bigger claim: Monos is the most exciting film I’ve seen in 2019. Some of that excitement comes from the undeniable appeal […]

The word “documentary” covers a lot of ground – far too much, really – and as such, a filmmaker can do a whole lot of different things. But as someone whose heart belongs to editing, and the belief that at the end of the day, all footage is just footage, and can be shaped into […]

A review requested by John Taylor, 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! First things first: form dictates that I give this film a star rating, and I want you […]

For some years now, director Quentin Tarantino has been maintaining that his tenth feature will also be his last. While I don’t actually believe that (artists retire when they die, no earlier), I suddenly find myself deeply hoping that he doesn’t believe it either. Or maybe that when he says that it will be “his” […]