Carla Simón’s sophomore feature, Alcarràs, opens in a way that closely resembles her promising if somewhat amorphous debut, 2017’s Summer 1993. That film, as its title suggests, constituted a cine-memoir minutely recreating Simón’s childhood in northern Catalonia (an autonomous region of Spain), and she stuck firmly to a kid’s-eye view throughout. Alcarràs initially seems to […]
When a formidable artist makes a point of working away from all of his most overt strengths, it demands that we pay some especially close attention. I say this even though I’m not sure that Parallel Mothers quite counts as Pedro Almodóvar deliberately working away from his overt strengths. But I would be inclined to […]
I think it is worth being fair to screenwriters David Desola and Pedro Rivero: I’m sure the genesis of The Platform was at least a little bit more sophisticated than, “what if Snowpiercer was, like, vertical?” But wherever the idea ultimately came from, the comparison is there to be made, and reductive as it is, […]
A shorter version of this review was previously published at The Film Experience There are two different, and perhaps irreconcilable ways to watch Klaus. First, we could look at it as the directorial debut of Sergio Pablos, an animator who rose through Disney in the 1990s, ending up getting his first supervising animator credits on […]
The 2019 Cannes Film Festival was a real punch in the gut: two of world cinema’s most irrepressible eternal adolescents both suddenly grew up all the way to make Old Man movies. Going by their U.S. release dates, we already had Quentin Tarantino show us his autumnal side with Once Upon a Time …in Hollywood; […]
Damned if I know why “Iranian filmmaker directing European art cinema” has turned out to be such a robust, reliable formula, but here we are with Everybody Knows, writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s eighth feature and the first made entirely outside of his home country, and the pattern holds. This is, admittedly, not necessarily the consensus opinion […]
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! By the start of 1988, Pedro Almodóvar had already made six features, including at least one candidate […]
A previous version of this review appeared at the Film Experience. In 2011, Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero co-directed a very dark-hearted short film called Birdboy, based on Vázquez’s comic Psiconautas. It left only a bit of an impression on me at the time, but over the years has clung voraciously to the lower tiers […]
Pedro Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited!… I’m sorry, I can’t even, with that title. Every single Almodóvar film sounds better with its original right name (is not Carne trémula a thousand times sexier-sounding than Live Flesh? Does not Hable con ella flow off the tongue more beautifully than Talk to Her?) but even by those standards, […]
The Great Snow Whitening of 2012 is long past and happily consigned to memory, but let us stop briefly to pay homage to the third film of that calendar year to adapt the Grimm brothers’ most famous fairy tale – the sweetly trivial Mirror Mirror and the wholly useless Snow White and the Huntsman preceded […]
Hey everyone, let’s play a fun game I invented, called “Being Jessica Chastain”. Pretend it’s late 2011, and you are a 34-year-old actress who has gone from complete anonymity to ubiquity in the blink of an eye. You’ve already been in the year’s best-reviewed art film, and you’re one of the most-praised members of the […]
So as it turns out, the cultural hegemony angle on The Impossible is a bit of a non-starter. You know the one I’m talking about, if you’ve been paying much attention to the talk around the movie: the first major international film about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which tells the story of how hundreds […]
