The most interesting thing about Dawson City: Frozen Time, by far, is the real-life history that enabled its existence. This is not to slight docu-essayist Bill Morrison, of the very highly-regarded 2002 Decasia (which I haven’t seen), among a couple dozen other films that are, as I understand it, mostly rather like this: moving collages […]
A review requested by reader WBTN, with thanks for 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! Every film tells us, early on, how we are supposed to watch it,* and so it is […]
A review requested by manwithpetgull, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The Woman Chaser has a teeny-tiny cult following, and this confuses me. It should have an extremely large cult following. Which is a contradiction, of course, and I mean… surely you know what I mean. Just for […]
A review requested by Beef Jerky Guy with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. God knows who thought it made sense for a biopic about the making of The Wizard of Speed and Time to find its way out into the world, but they sure went ahead and made […]
Ironically, given that it is a movie expressly and entirely about the communicative power of the moving image, Cameraperson gives us the answer key to understanding everything about it in the form of a title card that precedes any other footage: “For the past 25 years I’ve worked as a documentary cinematographer. I originally shot […]
I don’t know how much you like ’50s Hollywood musicals. Maybe you don’t care for them at all. Maybe they’re your favorite thing. But here’s what I do know: no matter how much you like ’50s musicals, you don’t like them nearly as much as Damien Chazelle loves them. You did not, after all, make […]
Early on in In the Last Days of the City, a filmmaker on a panel can be heard to grumble that he and his colleagues were there to discuss cinema, but that everything they’ve talked about has concerned politics. This is as close as this magnificently sloppy film comes to a direct thesis statement, for […]
A review dedicated to Nick Davis (who made no request with his donation, and it is my pleasure to offer this review of one of his favorite films), with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. We’re all familiar, I am sure, with the spectacle of a truly amazing, bravura […]
A review requested by Mark Falconer, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. My sense is that the 1954 version of A Star Is Born is thought of first and above all, and maybe to the exclusion of all else, as a Judy Garland vehicle. That’s fair, because Garland’s […]
There’s nothing more relaxingly unimaginative than a biopic of a socially significant artist, and 2015 didn’t produce one of those more defiantly unchallenging than Trumbo. We cannot say that this life and times of Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston), one of the most prominent faces to be screwed over by the anti-Leftist blacklist of […]
My instinct to say of Hail, Caesar! that you will love it if you fall into the enormously specific niche of people who adore Studio Era Hollywood but are still totally okay with making fun of it, and also consider themselves somewhere firmly entrenched in the Leftist-Socialist-Marxist end of the spectrum but are still totally […]
The admittedly ungenerous first response I had to Kent Jones’s lovingly fussed-over Hitchcock/Truffaut is that it’s extraordinarily inessential. The famous, one-of-a-kind book length interview, conducted in 1962 and published in 1966, between film directors Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut is, to begin with, much too long and full of far too many musings to be […]
