Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

The new “guess we have to call it a biopic, what other word fits?” Priscilla, directed by Sofia Coppola from a screenplay she adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoirs, is exactly what you suspect it is, though exactly what you suspect it is depends on your tastes and history with the director. Do you find […]

A review requested by Avshalom, 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! What a bizarre coincidence befell Paramount Pictures and Hollywood at large in 1990: two of the five Best […]

I wouldn’t precisely say that Oppenheimer is a Christopher Nolan movie for people who don’t like Christopher Nolan movies. I have people in my life who don’t like Christopher Nolan movies, and they’re still pretty cool towards this one. Maybe the way to put it is that Oppenheimer is the Christopher Nolan movie for people […]

I think it goes without saying that the best answer to the question, “what do you would the right way to remake Kurosawa Akira’s gorgeous 1952 melodrama Ikiru?” would be “I hope you die in a fire”, but setting that aside, Living is actually pretty good. The biggest problem with it, by far, is that […]

The Whale, essentially, does not work – “does not work as a movie”, I am almost tempted to say, in deference to its origins as a well-received stage play by Samuel D. Hunter (adapting the work to a screenplay himself). But frankly, I suspect it’s not any great shakes onstage, either; the dialogue and characterisations […]

The Woman King suffers from only one seriously unanswerable flaw, in my estimation, and it is unfortunately a pretty significant one given what the film is. Namely, its scenes of 19th Century warfare, using a mixture of guns, traditional African tribal weaponry, and what I greatly suspect are some weapons much too fanciful to be […]

The twin theses of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon are that A) something indescribable and precious was lost when filmmaking transitioned to sound in the late 1920s, and the art form is worse off for it; and B) the Hollywood film industry is a brutally exploitative place that gathers emotionally broken people all together so they can […]

The 2019 anti-mystery Knives Out has a game cast and an interestingly annoying structural conceit, buried (but not very deeply!) below some very dumb social satire and “extremely online” cultural touchstones. It is very much a “fix this one thing, and you’ve really got something here” proposition, but unfortunately, it was written and directed by […]

It’s a cheap shot to start a review of a movie with such a sturdy, meat-and-potatoes title as Women Talking with some joke about “they sure do!” or “well, you can’t say the movie didn’t tell you what to expect”, or whatnot. But it is, in fact, a movie that is to an extraordinary degree […]

In all my movie-going years, I have only very rarely encountered a film whose entire conceit screamed “come here and eat this huge plate of raw lima beans, because this is extremely serious and important” the way that She Said does. It’s a ripped-from-the-headlines story with the uncommon twist that we can point directly to […]

The Fabelmans is full of striking images. It is, in a sense, a film about striking images. Perhaps the most striking of all, to me, comes somewhat far into the movie – it is maybe even a spoiler to talk about it. But I’m not sure how much you can “spoil” The Fabelmans: the story […]

Martin McDonagh’s best strength as a director, it is clear at this point, is that he gets to be in the exclusive business of making films with original screenplays by Martin McDonagh. With The Banshees of Inisherin, the celebrated playwright turned cinematic writer-director is now up to four feature films, and that’s ample evidence to […]