Alternate Ending - Movie Review Podcast

With this week's episode, we offer a long overdue thanks to Patreon stalwart and regular guest star Gavin McDowell, who once asked Tim, Carrie, and Rob to share their thoughts on the wonderful cinematic form known as film noir. We were never to make that happen, but this is the next best thing: Gavin himself joins Tim to chat about the history, style, and classification of noir, along with fellow guest star Zev Burrows. Topics discussed include the ethically queasy appeal of the vicious women of noir, the difference between nihilism and cynicism, and whether either "film noir or "Alfred Hitchcock" can be reasonably described as film genres. In addition, for our movie roundtable, Zev catches up with the Jean Cocteau/Jean-Pierre Melville collaboration Les Enfants terribles, Gavin patches a terrible oversight by finally seeing Billy Wilder's The Apartment, and Tim shares his thoughts on British plays for television such as 1987's Road, his assignment from Patreon supporter David G.

Welcome to Your Movie Rocks, an Alternate Ending podcast hosted by Mandy Albert. For every episode, Mandy will watch a movie assigned by her guest host, followed by a lively discussion. There’s only one rule: no matter what the movie does to her, Mandy is only allowed to love it. August's episode is a very special one: Mandy welcomes to the AE podcasting family non other than Josh Albert, her co-host from the Star Trek: Enterprise podcast At Least There's a Dog - who is also, not incidentally, her husband - who comes with an olive branch to the AE community. Knowing that Christopher Nolan's 2020 time-shifting spy thriller Tenet is a highly contentious text on the Alternate Ending discord, Josh felt like it would be worthwhile for Mandy and himself to finally sit down and watch the thing and see what all the hubbub is about. And since Josh is a trained particle physicist and Mandy hates chase scenes, this movie full of cool chases and bad physics has a lot of hubbub indeed. Do they heal the rift in the AE fami

Our fifth episode of July 2025 is a very special one: cinematographer and colorist Devan Scott (and host of the podcast How Would Lubitsch Do It?, where Tim was a regular guest) joins Tim to discuss the new Arrow Video UHD releases of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, on which Devan served as technical advisor as part of a team working to make sure that those films got their first properly-curated and visually restored home releases since the dawn of home media. And from there, they dive into a larger conversation about the nature of film restoration and preservation, the confounding things that happen to movies when they get transferred to home video, and whether Wong Kar-wai can ever be trusted with his own films again. If you're the sort of person who groans inside when you learn that a new Criterion Collection release was based on a L'Immagine Ritrovata restoration, this one is a must-listen.

We have a big crowd for a busy month this time: to help unpack the sizable number of new releases coming in August, Tim is joined by three guests: Caleb, Cameron, and Zev. The four of them work their way through the late summer doldrums to find whatever promising new films are lying in amongst the usual horror cast-offs and hapless wannabe blockbusters. Before that, Caleb shares his thoughts on the 1989 version of Hard to Be a God, while Zev and Cameron discuss a pair of new releases from 2025, The Woman in the Yard and Heads of State. Tim wraps things up by catching up with the 2022 critical hit Return to Seoul, by request of Patreon supporter Max Jacobson

Tim and Brennan are joined by their first ever guest, Cameron Shaw, to discuss the movie event of the year, Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 4: DAWN OF THE VAMPIRES! Love the Podcast? Leave us a review! Follow Brennan on Twitter, Instagram, and Letterboxd Follow Tim on Letterboxd Follow Cameron Shaw's podcast Support Alternate Ending and check out our member perks, including voting for the films we cover on this program, via the Alternate Ending Patreon page!

With the latest attempt to make 21st Century audiences care about the most iconic superhero in comic book history barrelling down upon us in the form of James Gunn's Superman, we're taking a look at the character's long cinematic history, from '40s cartoons and serials up to the last notoriously botched attempt to make him the centerpiece of a shared cinematic universe. Superman expert Brian Fowler takes relative newbies Brennan Klein and Andrew Milne on a journey that asks such questions as What is the core essence of Superman? and Is there any reason to keep casting new Superman since Christopher Reeve died? and Is Superman more like Jesus, Moses, or a different figure altogether? Before getting to the main event, Andrew shares his thoughts on a 1989 Hong Kong picture with a world-class title, My Heart Is That Eternal Rose, while Brian and Brennan take a gander at some brand-new releases, Materialists and 28 Years Later.

Welcome to Your Movie Rocks, an Alternate Ending podcast hosted by Mandy Albert. For every episode, Mandy will watch a movie assigned by her guest host, followed by a lively discussion. There’s only one rule: no matter what the movie does to her, Mandy is only allowed to love it. In July's episode, Mandy gets her second Zack Snyder movie in six months, thanks to Brian Fowler, who assigns her all three and a half hours of Watchman: Ultimate Cut, the even longer and less cohesive version of a movie she quite disliked in its original theatrical version. Will the addition of hyper-violent pirate animation be enough to sway her over to Snyder's massive vision? And what dark betrayal led Brian to pick this movie for Mandy in the first place? Tune in to hear the answers to these and other questions, learn Mandy's theory about the color yellow, and revisit those long-ago days when superhero movies were still kind of a weird novelty.

We enter the back half of 2025 with a slate of popcorn movies and other assorted summer fun that so infuriates Tim that he tries to shut down the episode early rather than force himself to discuss any of them. Joining in to offer slightly more measured opinions, Caleb Wimble and Gavin McDowell also share their thoughts on the lost art of using color in your full-color motion picture, and movies whose titles are identical to other movies in the same series. But first, Caleb is fresh from the Provincetown Film Festival with thoughts on three new queer short films (Gender Reveal, Anyway, j'pisse assis, and Cuming Out), while Gavin reports on the holy terror of 2003's Joshua and the Promised Land. And courtesy of Patreon supporter Dan Prestwitch, Tim has finally taken a look at S. Craig Zaher's 2018 Dragged Across Concrete.

Tim and Brennan continue discussing movies about fast zombies by taking a bite out of the Taiwanese movie THE SADNESS! Love the Podcast? Leave us a review! Follow Brennan on Twitter, Instagram, and Letterboxd Follow Tim on Letterboxd Support Alternate Ending and check out our member perks, including voting for the films we cover on this program, via the Alternate Ending Patreon page!

This week's episode of the podcast is music to our ears, as Brennan is joined by Brian Fowler, Cameron Shaw, and Zev Burrows to talk about the evergreen subject of song cues in movies - when it works, when it doesn't, when it works so well that it basically kills off your ability to listen to a song ever again without a movie scene cuing itself up in your mind's eye. Before spinning those platters, the movie roundtable has a plethora of new releases, with Brian begrudgingly making it out to Karate Kid: Legends, Cameron muscling through all three hours of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, and Brennan going gaga for Final Destination Bloodlines. Zev, meanwhile, is channeling the spirit of the absent Tim to discuss a decades-old documentary, Errol Morris's A Brief History of Time.

Welcome to Your Movie Rocks, an Alternate Ending podcast hosted by Mandy Albert. For every episode, Mandy will watch a movie assigned by her guest host, followed by a lively discussion. There’s only one rule: no matter what the movie does to her, Mandy is only allowed to love it. In Episode 5, Mandy is joined by AE regular Andrew Milne for a lively discussion of a movie that does not even occupy the same fold of spacetime as her wheelhouse: Shimomura Yuji's Crazy Samurai Musashi (2020), a psychology experiment in the form of a movie.  But was it an enjoyable psychology experiment?  Tune in to hear Mandy and Andrew develop a Grand Theory of Crazy Samurai Musashi in real time, learn about one of the strangest movie gimmicks of the decade so far, and find out why Andrew was so eager to revisit a movie that made him angry the first time around.   You can snag a copy of Andrew's novel White Scar Across the Firmament here!

As we move into the heart of the summer movie season, there's a whole new crop of big popcorn movies  that might be good, and might just be dodgy, pandering crap. But enough about the live-action How to Train Your Dragon. This week, Brennan is joined by Andrew and Caleb to take a look at a surprisingly attractive slate of wide releases. In addition the movie roundtable discussion is nothing but recent new films: Caleb discusses the very serious issue drama Small Things Like These, while Andrew goes all the other direction to the action movie documentary Wick Is Pain. And Brennan shares the results of his encounter with a certain Clown in a Cornfield. Caleb is on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/calebwimble.bsky.social, and you can follow Andrew's new publishing adventures at https://www.instagram.com/anmilneauthor/

Tim and Brennan continue discussing movies about fast zombies by traveling over to Germany to take a bite out of 2010’s RAMMBOCK: BERLIN UNDEAD!   Love the Podcast? Leave us a review! Follow Brennan on Twitter, Instagram, and Letterboxd Follow Tim on Letterboxd Support Alternate Ending and check out our member perks, including voting for the films we cover on this program, via the Alternate Ending Patreon page!

Our topic this week is the very embodiment of "discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time": finding the scenes that actually work in movies that mostly don't Tim is joined by Mandy, whose Your Movie Rocks podcast makes her the perfect expert at finding the diamonds in a pile of coal (or a pile of... something else, as she describes on the episode), and we're also very thrilled to welcome back to the Alternate Ending podcast world Rioghnach Robinson. Before they talk about the subject of the day, as part of our movie roundtable Mandy (goaded by Tim) goes long on the new The Luckiest Man in America, Rioghnach goes back a couple of years to the unjustly overlooked I Want You Back from 2022, and thanks to Patreon supporter Hallvarður, Tim finally caches up with Jacques Rivette's iconic 1974 masterpiece Céline and Julie Go Boating.

Welcome to Your Movie Rocks, an Alternate Ending podcast hosted by Mandy Albert. For every episode, Mandy will watch a movie assigned by her guest host, followed by a lively discussion. There’s only one rule: no matter what the movie does to her, Mandy is only allowed to love it. In Episode 4, Mandy and Gavin McDowell have what might very well be the single nerdiest conversation in the history of Alternate Ending as they discuss the 2009 costume drama Agora, and spend even more time discussing the history of the early Christian church and schools of Greek philosophy, leading to some rather intense, inflamed passions about what does and does not make sense to include in a cinematic treatment of a bunch of ancient Alexandrines that 99.9% of the audience will never have heard of. Tune in to hear why Gavin selected a movie for Mandy about which he already knew her opinion, hear his pitch for a musical about the Council of Ephesus, and learn way, way more about 4th Century Egypt history and historiography than yo

April 2025 has five Tuesdays, and whenever that happens the last Tuesday of the month is a "dealer's choice" event, with Tim going off on whatever tangent catches his fancy. Unfortunately, due to some scheduling trouble, this particular fifth Tuesday episode has been delayed a bit, but it's worth it: Tim has a conversation with UW-Madison film scholar Will Quade about the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and what we can learn about the state of world art cinema by the choices festival programmers make. Will is one of the only people I know with more irascible and idiosyncratic opinions than my own, and we do tend to go off on some rants once we get going.

In preparation for the start of the summer movie season, Tim is joined by Brian and Caleb, who are all a little surprised to find that they're finally looking forward to some of the wide releases of 2025, after a wobbly first third of the calendar year. But before we get to the wild and thrilling spectacle of popcorn movie season, it's one of the most sober-minded movie roundtables we've ever held, as Caleb finally catches up with legendary grim war movie Come and See, while Brian learns all about the savage sexism of the indie film industry thanks to Chasing Chasing Amy. Tim, meanwhile has a pair of Patreon requests to talk about that are almost as fun: Freya Neeley has assigned him the paranoid anti-communist ravings of the vicious-hearted If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, while CRD has given him the gaudy nightmare spectacle of Nazism consuming German culture in Luchino Visconti's The Damned. And stick around for Caleb's update on his game Let Us Build a Tower. Tim apologizes for the odd fade-outs

Tim and Brennan kick off a brand new quarter focusing on Fast Zombies with this episode on the 2014 horror-comedy COOTIES!   Love the Podcast? Leave us a review! Follow Brennan on Twitter, Instagram, and Letterboxd Follow Tim on Letterboxd Support Alternate Ending and check out our member perks, including voting for the films we cover on this program, via the Alternate Ending Patreon page!

Brennan is joined this week by Cameron (whom we finally give a chance to plug her own podcast, Stoneybrook Reunion) and Andrew, and the three of them are having a conversations about incomplete franchises: series that stalled out in the middle, sequel hooks that never caught anything, book adaptations that didn't make it all the way through the source material. Before they get to that point, Andrew shares his experience with the confounding 2001 film Despiser, while Cameron looks at the new release Eephus, and Brennan brings the even newer release Locked. It's a wide-ranging look at movies and series old and new, and it provides a lot to think about, even though Tim, in absentia, is screaming all sorts of nasty things at the group for failing to mention Horizon: An American Saga.

Welcome to Your Movie Rocks, an Alternate Ending podcast hosted by Mandy Albert.  For every episode, Mandy will watch a movie assigned by her guest host, followed by a lively discussion.  There’s only one rule: no matter what the movie does to her, Mandy is only allowed to love it. For Episode 3, Mandy is joined by Zev Burrows for some quality time In a Lonely Place (1950) with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame.  Tune in to find out what it has in common with The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, why more movies should be made in the middle of their stars’ messy divorces, and what Zev was thinking when he decided, like a weirdo, that it might be fun to watch a good movie for the podcast.