I don’t know if Boots Riley has any interest in directing or writing a second feature film. And if he did, I don’t know if I’d expect it to be an even better refinement over his debut, or if he’d have one of those careers that begins in an explosion of pure creativity and then […]
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! Of Mel Brooks’s first four feature-length comedies, which are also his four best, 1974’s Blazing Saddles is […]
It’s one thing to say “this is a dark comedy”. It’s quite another to come face-to-face with a comedy that has the word “death” right there in the title. So if I were to say, for example, that The Death of Stalin is a dark comedy, I’m not telling you the half of it. It’s […]
For the first 20 years of his career, Don Hertzfeldt – America’s greatest living independent animator – worked analogue. And not just analogue, but analogue. The fact that his short films were all drawn by hand on paper wasn’t merely a technical curiosity, it was central to how several of his best projects existed: Rejected, […]
Alexander Payne’s seventh feature, Downsizing, takes place in a world where technology exists to shrink human beings down to about five inches tall. This technology was invented to ease the burden of overpopulation on the planet’s resources, but in practice, most people who go through the downsizing procedure do so because their money is worth […]
Honestly, it gives me genuine hope that something as fucking awful as Bright can still get made. This is a movie that people believed in. Especially screenwriter Max Landis: you can tell just from how proudly the script presents all of its baffling, confused world-building and social satire, like a three-year-old coated head to toe […]
I’m sure I missed something, but did it really take 24 years before we finally got a knock-off of The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom? That’s not exactly what I, Tonya is, though it’s pretty good for a first approximation. The child of Positively True Adventures and The Wolf of Wall Street, now that gets us […]
Writer-director Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner The Square is a very particular, and at least mildly irritating, kind of satire. It’s a sometimes delicate, and oftentimes savage, attack on the moral inner lives of a certain kind of bourgeois intellectual type (who is probably male, definitely white, socially liberal, and inclined towards post-modernist art), and […]
Here’s my current frustration at the diminished state of film criticism. I could, in this moment, point you to a whole lot of reviews talking about how Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is an urgent text for our modern times, taking on as it does the issue of how violence against women goes under-reported and […]
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 […]
There’s absolutely no reason to expect much of The Ice Cream Truck, and maybe it’s for that reason that I found it to be such a fetching affair. In at least two very noticeable respects, the film flagrantly boasts the limitations of its teeny-weeny budget: the dialogue, particularly in outdoor scenes, has the unmissable, overly […]
I wonder if I could possibly get away with calling Ingrid Goes West a psychological horror film? A psychological thriller, for certain. Which I mention because I do feel like that’s been lost a little bit in the discussion that has taken place all around the movie, which seems mostly content to treat the film […]
