A review requested by Michael Matula, 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! Pink Floyd’s 1979 double album The Wall was accompanied by one of the most ridiculously complex tour […]
The Rider isn’t sensu stricto a biopic of its star, Brady Jandreau, but it’s a pretty fine line. Jandreau was an up-and-coming rodeo star out of South Dakota when he fell off a bronco he was riding and suffered a debilitating brain injury, and there’s not a single word of that sentence that doesn’t also […]
Chalk up another victory for the evergreen “non-Americans understand America better than Americans” genre. Lean on Pete has an English writer-director and an English producer, it was made using only British money, and it is the most clearheaded, unsentimental portrayal of the perilous life of poor Americans living outside of the social mainstream since 2016’s […]
If one holds onto the belief that movies are first and above all meant to be emotion-generating objects (and this is not the only belief about movies one could hold, but it’s the one I’m happy to stick with as an operating principle), one could hardly hope for a more movie-ish movie than The Work. […]
Two things first. One, War for the Planet of the Apes is an entirely excellent bit of popcorn drama, the first summer movie of 2017 (an important, subtly different thing than any old movie released in the summer) that I think has a fighting chance of still being passionately remembered 20 years hence, but having […]
Return to the complete Twin Peaks index Within the last ten years or so, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me has undergone a substantial re-evaluation, and what was once greeted as one of David Lynch’s worst features has since been reclaimed by many fans as one of his best. I am a little sorry to […]
A second review requested by Chris W, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Back when it was brand new (and before I ever saw it), I read somebody, I cannot recall who, describe the plot of the 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas as follows: “A man tries […]
A Monster Calls will make you cry. I suppose I ought to qualify that in some way – it will make some of you cry based on certain life experiences you might have had, etc. etc. – but that barely seems correct. A Monster Calls will make you cry the same that that way that […]
It’s tempting to write off I, Daniel Blake as just Ken Loach doing that Ken Loach that he does so well, as if being one the greatest leftist message-movie directors in the history of the English language cinema is something to sniff at. Certainly it’s more than tempting to look at the uniquely great main […]
Manchester by the Sea is the kind of movie wherein, the more one tries to excitedly talk about all of its best parts, the more it sounds like a suffocating nightmare. “It’s such a great depiction of crippling guilt, like no other movie that I can think of! The main character is devoured by the […]
The Eyes of My Mother wins, by my count, two superlatives for itself among recent American horror films. It is, on the one hand, the most beautiful such movie in an inordinately long time – long enough that I gave up trying to figure out when. That’s selling it a bit short, actually: it’s also […]
Starless Dreams is an exercise in pure heartbreak. The documentary has more on its mind than simply making the viewer feel terrible (it is, in fact, a social problem film, though one that offers nothing resembling a solution for the seemingly endless nightmare of human suffering it depicts), but feeling terrible is an unavoidable side […]
