A review requested by Not Fenimore, 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! So here we are, face-to-face with the all-time worst winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. […]
Bong Joon-ho has been a brand-name director among cinephiles since 2006’s monster movie-cum-domestic drama The Host, and South Korean cinema’s ongoing golden age has been around for even longer, at least as far back as 2002’s Oasis, directed by Lee Chang-dong. So there’s not really any sense in which Bong’s seventh feature, Parasite, is particularly […]
A review requested by Benjamin Ross Johnson, 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 foremost skill of the great writer-director Billy Wilder, I think, is his ability to take […]
Winner of the 2019 Best Picture Review poll In deference to the idea that negativity is hard on your body and mind, I would like to begin talking about A Beautiful Mind, winner of the 74th Oscar for Best Picture, with my compliment. Starting right at the studio logos, we hear a really lovely motif […]
The question of whether Green Book is worse on race or worse on class is a tough one. It’s at least more spectacularly bad on race; but I, for one, was unprepared for it to touch on class at all, so that came as the far uglier surprise. Either way, it’s the kind of modestly […]
The first runner-up in the 2018 Best Picture Review Poll There is an absolute limit on how bad any film adaptation of the 1956 stage musical My Fair Lady can possibly be, and that limit is set by the fact that, no matter what else goes wrong, you still have Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick […]
The winner of the 2018 Best Picture Review Poll There are two very different stereotypes of what kind of film wins the Best Picture Oscar, and neither of them is actually true. The kind of people whose movie-watching habits never extends to anything that isn’t a heavily-marketed wide-release blockbuster tends to suppose that Oscar-winning films […]
I like Guillermo del Toro quite a lot, and I like Jean-Pierre Jeunet a lot, and I like them for very similar reasons – they both make over-saturated movies dominated by production design and fanciful rather than realistic visual effects – and I still would never, ever pretend that I wanted to see a film […]
Moonlight is one kind of thing I do not like much at all: a coming-of-age story involving the protagonist’s sexual awakening (it is, to be fair, an excellent one; but it’s my least-favorite genre in narrative art. Consider my bias fully disclosed). It is also one thing I like very much: a structural experiment, in […]
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. This week: a third feature-length adaptation of Ben-Hur is, you know, definitely a thing one could choose to produce. While wondering […]
A review requested by Monica Reida, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. This article is doing no less than quadruple-duty, so get ready. First, it’s of course fulfilling Monica’s request to go along with her donation to the ACS. Second, it’s plugging another hole in the list of […]
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, […]
