A note about the critic. While I am a devoted Austen-ite, her final, posthumously published novel Persuasion is not one of her works that particularly captures my imagination, good as it may be. Thus, I am somewhat inoculated against people fucking with it, which probably explains why I’m not illegally downloading a copy of Netflix’s […]
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 […]
Sometimes we Americans get cheated out of a perfect title. Claire Denis’ 14th or 15th solo narrative feature—depends upon whether you want to count 1994’s magnificent, hour-long U.S. Go Home, made for the same remarkable French anthology TV series that gave us Olivier Assayas’ Cold Water and André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds; “Denis’ latest film” would […]
In a career spanning 45 years and nine feature-length films, the great Terence Davies, one of Great Britain’s finest living directors, has made only three kinds of films: autobiographies, wordy literary adaptations, and biopics of poets. His newest feature, Benediction, is sort of all three of these things in one body. Officially speaking, it’s only […]
A review requested by Devin, 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’s sophisticated enough for children, simple enough for adults!” reads the tagline on the poster for the 1970 […]
Jacques Audiard directing a film from a script he co-wrote with Céline Sciamma is one of the biggest-name mash-ups that French cinema is capable of producing right now (they had a third co-writer, Léa Mysius, and the script was adapted from short stories by Adrian Tomine, but from the perspective of the art house movie […]
TIM: The romantic comedy was a mainstay of the commercial film marketplace for decades, stretching all the way back to the silent era, but in the 21st Century, the genre has taken a terrible beating. Theatrically-released romcoms have become quite a rare beast indeed, which is the first thing that makes the new Marry Me […]
The new adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 novel Death on the Nile written by Michael Green and directed by Kenneth Branagh is an almost perfect lateral move, quality-wise from the 2017 adaptation of Christie’s 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express, also written by Green and directed by Branagh. In a sense, this already speaks […]
The Worst Person in the World, according to the film of that title, is a certain young woman living in Oslo, named Julie (Renate Reinsve). We spend a few years with her, from her late 20s to her early 30s, and one important thing is learned in those years, twice: first, we learn that Julie […]
I am curious if future cinephiles will ever come around to think of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy as anything other than “Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s other film from 2021”. Winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Fesitval certainly isn’t a little deal, but it doesn’t seem to have done too very much to […]
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 […]
