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 Brennan Klein, 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! It would have taken the work of a none-too-terribly thorough rewrite to transform Shock Treatment into a […]
There’s one main reason any film gets a sequel: because some producers got a bit of money, and want to get a bit more. And for the great majority of sequels, that’s where it stops, which is why so many of them are such joyless retreads, doing the same thing but bigger and louder (or, […]
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 […]
A review requested by Nathan Morrow, 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! It’s impossible to talk about The King and the Mockingbird without talking about its torturous path into […]
A review requested by Gabe, 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! Starship Troopers is maybe the clearest articulation I can name of the disappointing fact that you can never, […]
We can go on about all the different things that go into the art of sketch-comedian-turned-omnipresent-media-creator Jordan Peele, but I will say that for me it’s really very simple. The reason Peele matters – the reason that the things he writes are enjoyable and good – is because more than just about any other new […]
Every satire of the for-profit art world makes largely the same points about that target, and Velvet Buzzsaw, the third film by writer-director Dan Gilroy, is not looking to break the habit. Oh, sure, it drags in the stuff of a slasher-style horror movie for its second hour, but it’s still basically the same thing […]
There are individual moments of goodness littered all throughout Vice, and individual moments of badness, just like with any movie. Unluckily for the film, the moments of badness are all given pride of place, and so what might, in a happier life, have just been a moderately irritating “hip” biopic turns into one of the […]
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: Muppets fuck in The Happytime Murders. Because humanity has fallen from God’s light, it’s no surprise that this is […]
The claims that BlacKkKlansman represents a renaissance for Spike Lee are at least slightly overheated. After all, even his very great movies are frustrating and flawed (except for Do the Right Thing, which is frustrating and perfect), and even his very bad movies are still interesting for the complexity and intensity of their ideas. There […]
A review requested by Diego Santa Maria, 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! One will from time to time come across a film for which one tangibly lacks the […]
