Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Every single review of The Zone of Interest, the fourth feature film directed by Jonathan Glazer, at some point will reference the subtitle of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil. Some reviews will mention it in the context of this being a very powerful illustration of Arendt’s most famous idea. […]

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 […]

There are both a good idea for a movie and a great idea for a movie tangled up right next to each other inside of Saint Omer, and it is one of the more disappointing developments of the young 2023 movie year (the film is technically a 2022 release in the U.S., but only in […]

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 […]

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 […]

It’s incredibly difficult to discuss Flux Gourmet without starting at “this is a film by Peter Strickland”, which isn’t even the most useful way into the film, in this case. One of Strickland’s two biggest identifying characteristics doesn’t apply here: while all three of Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy, and In Fabric (his […]

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. Last week: David Cronenberg, in his years as an elder statesman of cinema, has taken the new Crimes of the Future […]

Dying is one of the only two entirely universal human experiences (the other is being born), which would in principal make it one of the great subjects of art, but I guess it’s understandable why it isn’t. Death is, after all, depressing. It frequently involves physical suffering. It is something we don’t like to think […]

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 […]

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 […]

One cannot talk about Memoria (if one is an American, anyway) without talking about the simply batshit release strategy that its director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and its U.S. Distributor, Neon, have concocted for it. In short: one screen at a time in North America, one week at a time, and it will theoretically just float from […]

In all honesty, just the title of The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) is enough to clue us in that this is going to be a fairly presumptuous motion picture, even without knowing one single other thing about it. Is there a more pretentious punctuation mark, in this context, than […]