A review requested by Stephen, 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! I think there is a very strong argument to be made that Leo McCarey was the greatest conservative […]
The genre in which the intermittently great American filmmaker Richard Linklater most consistently demonstrates his greatness (outside of “Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke walk around a city having epistemological debates”) must surely be “Richard Linklater revisits a very particular slice of Richard Linklater’s own life”. And as far as that goes, he’s perhaps never gone […]
It’s always interesting to see where a director goes after making A Big One, and Céline Sciamma certainly hasn’t made A Bigger One than her fourth feature, 2019’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. She also hasn’t made a less characteristic one, which is perhaps why her follow-up, Petite Maman, is such a pointed step […]
King Richard is the kind of film designed to make you feel sweet and warm and nice while you’re watching it, with maybe just a soupçon of self-righteousness, and then to evaporate like the morning dew the literal instant that it’s over. It is a sports biopic, probably my all-time second-least-favorite kind of movie (musician […]
I have from time to time mentioned that I have a rule of thumb for evaluating documentaries that I call the “glossy magazine” test: did I get anything from this movie that I wouldn’t have gotten from reading an article in a glossy magazine on the same subject. It’s basically a way of getting at […]
Minari won both the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize – Dramatic at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and this is extraordinarily appropriate. It checks all the boxes of a stereotypical Sundance indie so hard that I almost can’t think of the last film to check them harder (not even the 2021 winner of […]
CODA is unbearably cloying and contains barely a single narrative beat that isn’t an ossified cliché. Naturally, it has been greeted with rave reviews and a spirited bidding war in the wake of its opening-night premiere at the Sundance Film Festival; elevating sentimental schlock made with little more than the most functional artistry has been […]
No film has ever deserved its reputation less than How Green Was My Valley, an adaptation by Philip Dunne of Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 novel that carefully balances gooey nostalgic sentiment and troubling clarity, is one of the most beautifully-shot films of the 1940s, and represents one of the highest achievements of John Ford’s career-long fascination […]
Before going into anything other details about 1944’s Going My Way, it’s probably appropriate to note that it was an enormous hit. It was the third highest-grossing film released during World War II in the United States, behind This Is the Army and For Whom the Bell Tolls (both released in 1943), making such an […]
I have a my disagreements with legendary film critic Pauline Kael, some of them fairly intense, but one thing I’ll never fault her for: she could write a hell of a sentence. And there’s no sentence of hers I co-sign more eagerly than the one that she used to start her review of Rain Man, […]
Onward is the 22nd animated feature made by Pixar Animation Studios, and thus we arrive at a numerically exciting point. For 2010’s Toy Story 3, the last movie in that company’s virtually uninterrupted early string of medium-defining computer animated films, was their 11th feature, which means they have now been a company that makes generally […]
It’s all right there in the title, a simple little thing that sounds as sensible as a well-fitting pair of shoes: Varda by Agnès. As in “Varda”, the filmmaking career of one of the all-time greats, a master director if ever a director was a master, someone who has more than earned the right to […]
