The New York Times' Best Movies of the Century

To kick off the Autumn of Blood, in which they discuss pre-Scream 1990s slashers, Tim and Brennan drill into the 1996 Brian Yuzna joint THE DENTIST! 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!

Everybody loves to argue about a list, which is why this week's episode finds Brennan, Cameron, and Andrew digging into the recent list of the 100 best movies of the 21st Century published by The New York Times. What films made us mad? What films mad us happy? What's conspicuously missing? Check out the episode for the team's answers to these questions and more, as well as their individual ballots for the ten best films of the last 25 years. And before we get to that, three wildly different films come to the movie roundtable: Andrew watched Andrzej Żuławski's 1972 The Devil, Cameron checks out the biographical documentary It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley, and Brennan shrugs his way through Darren Aronofsky's uncharacteristic new film Caught Stealing.

For September’s episode, Mandy welcomes back Sects, Lies, and Videotape maven Gavin McDowell, who decided to take a very different approach from his last visit and assign Mandy a movie he was pretty sure (but not positive) she’d like: David Lean’s 222-minute epic and perennial greatest-film-ever candidate Lawrence of Arabia. Tune in to hear the struggles of a parent trying to find three hours and forty-two minutes for a movie night, many musings on camel sartoriality, and whether Mandy did, in fact, enjoy watching two unbelievably gorgeous men make goo-goo eyes at each other for such a long time. There may also be discussion of the film.

September might be one of the most notorious dumping grounds on the cinematic calendar, but the Alternate Ending crew is still excited enough to talk about it that Brennan has been joined by no fewer than three guests this time. Caleb, Brian, and Mandy are on hand to see if there are any silk purses to be made out of this sow's ear of a month, and as it turns out, there's one title in particular that has everybody on the panel genuinely excited. Even beyond that, a few of our brave guests try to make the case that there might be something to remain hopeful for as autumn comes along to shove summer to the side. For the movie roundtable, we have four new releases to talk about: Caleb catches up with the buzzy Netflix original KPop Demon Hunters, Mandy grimaces through the body horror relationship drama Together, and Brennan checks in on the last smash hit of the summer, Weapons. And Brian felt duty-bound to check out an icon's return to motion pictures in Sweet Revenge, and boy does everybody end up having some very strong feelings on that one...

To honor the 50th anniversary of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Tim and Brennan review a classic movie referenced in “Science Fiction, Double Feature,” namely 1963’s THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS!   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!

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 family? The only way to find out is to listen!

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!