I don’t think it’s a good habit to get into to take account of the advertising campaign materials – part of what we call “paratexts” in the thinking-too-hard business – as part of a film review, but in the special case of Armageddon Time, I will make an exception. The film’s poster, which you can […]
Tár, the official “movie for people who care about challenging cinema for adults” movie in the mix for the 2022 awards season, and writer-director Todd Field’s return to filmmaking after 16 years, is the most perfect tabula rasa I have encountered in a long time. I have had conversations and read reviews stating, in essence, […]
Let’s at least give Don’t Worry Darling this much credit: it’s easy to imagine this being a much drearier and more haranguing social satire than it is. In large part, this is because the film has such an extraordinarily hard time keeping any of its many ideas straight, or developing any of them to any […]
A review requested by Brian, 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! The costume drama is a genre as old as the movies themselves (The Execution of Mary, Queen of […]
In a long career as Hollywood royalty that has generally swung between the none-too-distant poles of “affably, watchably mediocre” and “tediously mediocre”, Ron Howard’s best film as a director has long been 1995’s Apollo 13, and I would be inclined to say that it’s not really a close race. I’m not quite going to say […]
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. In the week now ending: Downton Abbey: A New Era is a movie with a script by Julian Fellowes, focused on […]
Even by the highly dubious standards of Oscarbait biopics whose commercial and awards campaign both hang insistently on one single performance and literally nothing else whatsoever about the film, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a pretty cruddy movie. Adapted from a 2000 documentary of the same title by screenwriter Abe Sylvia and director Michael […]
The Tragedy of Macbeth comes burdened with a simply relentless amount of baggage, as much as any motion picture released in 2021. First, there’s the matter of the material itself: why in God’s name do we need another film of Macbeth? It is perhaps the Shakespeare play to have been the best-served by the movies: […]
It was, I believe, my father who introduced me to the phrase “he thinks his shit don’t stink” as a pithy way of denigrating the kind of person who is arrogantly convinced of their righteous infallibility. I will not say of writer-director Adam McKay, and his newest film, Don’t Look Up, that he thinks his […]
“These two unrelated movies constitute a trend” is not by any stretch of the imagine my favorite bad habit in film criticism. Yet it seems awfully hard not to notice that December 2021 has borne witness to two different movies made by A-list Oscar-winning directors that are both technically new adaptations of non-movie media, but […]
Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac feels like it would be a perfect candidate for being turned into a musical, and indeed it would appear that exactly that transformation has happened, multiple times, in both French and English. So arguably there’s actually nothing special about the new film Cyrano, except that it is, as […]
The new film adaptation of the 1957 stage musical West Side Story has an exceptionally high “why did you feel the need to make this” bar to clear. Because it’s also, in the public imagination if not in the most precisely literal sense, a remake of the 1961 film musical West Side Story, one of […]
