Whether you consider it a strength, or the movie’s most damning flaw, I think this much cannot be denied: The Godfather, Part II knows the scale of the movie it’s following, and it is hellbent on topping it. 1972’s The Godfather, adapted from Mario Puzo’s 1969 crime novel, was never supposed to be one of […]
You have perhaps heard of The Godfather. It is a three-hour movie about the Mafia, released in 1972 by a studio that had been losing money at a steady clip, directed by an up-and-coming filmmaker whose last film had been a major flop (he was hired, in large part because the desperate studio knew that […]
A review requested by Gavin, 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! There are two different sides to groundbreaking animation director Ralph Bakshi, and I confess that I don’t particularly […]
On the one hand, Midnight Cowboy is exactly the kind of film that I wish they would try more often, and that they’d meet with this kind of success whenever they tried it. Here we have a film with unabashedly experimental editing, polished and tidied a bit for mainstream consumption of course; we also have […]
Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of the bibles of the 1960s counterculture in the U.S., a link between the Beats of the late ’50s and the hippies of the late ’60s and their shared belief in the fundamental rottenness of the The System. That it would be made […]
The French Connection is the Best Picture Oscar winner from the 1970s that makes me happiest. Not because I think it’s the best of them – it just barely makes the top half of winners that decade for me,* and I’m not even 100% sure I like it best of its nomination class† – but […]
Above and beyond everything else, The Other is an exceptionally smart film. Not intelligent; smart. It does a superb job of manipulating and guiding its viewer, not just through Thomas Tryon’s script (adapted from his own novel), but through the way it keeps dodging the stylistic norms of its genre. To look at the script, […]
A second review requested by Patton with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. How in the name of the good Lord does one even go about starting to discuss Apocalypse Now? It’s among the small population of films about which I think it’s more or less impossible to […]
A review requested by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, dedicated to the memory of his father, with my thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It is 1972, and you have a Western with Robert Redford in it. With that in mind, what’s most surprising about Jeremiah Johnson […]
In memory of Michael Cimino, 3 February 1939 – 2 July 2016 Compared to the glut of masterpiece-level films about World War II, American cinema has – perhaps surprisingly – never produced a wholly great and uncompromised movie about the United States’ war in Vietnam. Too many psychic scars, maybe; could be that the divisive, […]
The focus of this review being its subject’s position in the context of filmmaking in 1977, it is not based upon the series of “Special Edition” re-releases in theaters and on home video that have routinely happened since 1997. Instead, I take as my source material the “Despecialized Edition” reconstruction by fan editor Harmy of […]
A review requested by Jonathan Storey, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The title of the magnificent 1975 Warner Bros. release Dog Day Afternoon gives the game away: whatever else it’s about, and there’s a lot of things we could say it’s specifically about, it’s about how fucking […]
