Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

A review requested by Kevin, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. An older review of this film can be found here. It’s clear right from the title of 2008’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird (which I believe to be a direct translation from the Korean) that the film intends […]

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 […]

There are many indelible moments sprinkled across the 128 minutes of The Power of the Dog, writer-director Jane Campion’s first feature film in the twelve long years since 2009’s Bright Star (which was itself her first film in the six long years since 2003’s In the Cut, so if I am doing the math right, […]

Clint Eastwood, all 91 years of him, has been at the “what if this is his very last film?” stage of his directorial career at least since 2008’s Gran Torino, ten whole movies ago. That was also the first of his “well, even if he keeps directing, you can definitely tell that he’s retiring from […]

An apology, or if you prefer a warning: this is perhaps less on the order of a review than it is a rant. The thing is, I found Nomadland to be a completely repulsive movie, cloying when it works and actively pernicious when it doesn’t, and simply having to choke it down was galling enough; […]

“Lunatic visionary cult director Sono Sion makes his English-language debut with a post-apocalyptic samurai Western starring Nicolas Cage” is a collection of words that feels like it was lab-created to end up with a kind of heavily self-aware “Weird”-in-square-quotes example of something too knowing and calculated in its what-the-fuck wildness to be authentic. And arguably, […]

It is perhaps ironic for a film titled News of the World to have nothing actually new within it. Fortunately, it’s doing very familiar things very well, so even if the exact people most likely to enjoy what it’s doing (diehard Western fans) are exactly the people most likely to have seen it all before, […]

Let Him Go has benefited to an unusual degree from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic: it’s a film that almost certainly would have vanished without a ripple in any other circumstances other than being one of the handful of movies to get a large-sized theatrical release in the United States in the last four months of […]

Kelly Reichardt has never felt like a director who was forcing her career to go in a certain direction, or build to any kind of definitive statement. Her first six features, dating back to 1994’s River of Grass, share a good number of characteristics, but one of the most important is that they’re resolutely small […]

Given the way I’m framing this summer’s marathon of horror movies, it’s hard to resist the temptation to speculate about the “Australianness” of these films, how their peculiarities reveal something about the cultural character of that continent and its film production. The fact that I don’t really know all that much about Australian culture puts […]

Barbara Stanwyck – the most sarcastic, mercilessly incisive leading lady of her generation, a biting sophisticate in the body of a tough dame. Samuel Fuller – the great journalist-director whose films have the precision and authenticity of a no-bullshit reporter, with the sensationalism of a man who knows the best way to get people to […]

One thing that nobody can take away from Bacurau, the third feature directed by Brazilian art house favorite Kleber Mendonça Filho (co-directing here alongside his former production designer Juliano Dornelles): it’s unpredictable. The film wear so many hats over the course of its 131 minutes, sometimes wearing them on top of each other, that it’s […]