Animation and surrealism – and I am here referring to surrealism in a narrower sense (though not the strictest sense), as the attempt to visually reconcile dream-reality and waking-reality into a single state, not as an intensified word for “weird” – have a difficult relationship. On the one hand, since surrealism is, in its way, […]
One of the first things to happen in The Turning is that Kurt Cobain dies.* This has nothing to do with anything that follows: Cobain never becomes a plot point, and there’s no Nirvana on the soundtrack (though there is some Courtney Love). But it does let us know, right away, that this story takes […]
Peter Strickland has made his reputation among arthouse genre fans largely on the back of his wild pastiches, with 2012’s Berberian Sound Studio and 2014’s The Duke of Burgundy both drawing extensively from the look and texture of European grindhouse pictures of the ’70s (Italian horror in the former case, French softcore in the latter). […]
It’s been a good few years for films that have next-level animation tied to a garbage screenplay, but even in the company of Loving Vincent or Klaus, Promare is on some other plane entirely. It is, I say without any excess of hyperbole, one of the most extraordinary triumphs of color, character design, camera movement, […]
Hunting for Freudian symbolism in movies is, I think, almost never a rewarding pursuit, but sometimes you just have to admit when a film slaps you in the face with its enormous engorged cock. And so it is with The Lighthouse, whose titular location is a giant erection of white stone that is routinely framed […]
A review requested by John Taylor, 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! First things first: form dictates that I give this film a star rating, and I want you […]
Intermittently 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: Disney’s new version of The Lion King presents painstakingly animated photorealistic CGI lions milling about doing lion shit. This might […]
Intermittently 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. Last week: there are many ways we could plausibly describe Midsommar, one of them being to call it a psychodrama about the […]
It’s been just a little bit more than two years since Collateral Beauty barfed its way in and out of theaters, and ever since then, it feels like we’ve been living in a golden age for astonishing cinematic boondoggles. Over the decades, the Hollywood film industry has been fine-tuned to discourage truly horrible filmmaking, and […]
The new film directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by David Kajganich under the title of Suspiria is a remake of the 1977 Dario Argento film also titled Suspiria. It’s official, in the credits and everything, and they share the same plot: an American girl named Susie Bannion (“Suzy” in the original) travels to Germany […]
It’s reckless as hell to say, after the man has made a grand total of two feature films separated by eight years, that Panos Cosmatos is one of my favorite active filmmakers. It’s reckless to assume he even is active in any meaningful sense, or that his two extant films will be joined by a […]
