Since its 1985 publication, Don DeLillo’s most celebrated novel, White Noise, has been one of cinema’s white whales. In various superficial respects, the book has always appeared ripe for adaptation—characters are vivid; snappy dialogue abounds; there’s even a literally central catastrophe that unmistakably lends itself to visual pyrotechnics. Yet it’s taken nearly 40 years for […]
Other than the pilot episode, all reviews of The X-Files are exclusive for Patreon subscribers. Click here to support Alternate Ending through Patreon. Season 1 (1993-1994) Pilot (10 September, 1993) B Deep Throat (17 September, 1993) B+ Squeeze (24 September, 1993) A- Conduit (1 October, 1993) A- The Jersey Devil (8 October, 1993) C Shadows […]
The phrase “elevated horror” is one I am very reluctant to use, since its meaning seems to generally land on something amorphous like “horror movies that people who think they’re too good for horror movies are willing to praise”. But there’s definitely something there, and “elevated horror” is as good a shorthand to describe that […]
Every week 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: we are far enough into the present wave of Stephen King adaptations that we’ve hit the “all the famous […]
Kimi is by no plausible yardstick a stretch for director Steven Soderbergh: the most excessively generous thing I could imagine saying about it is that, for a film which unambiguously and indeed proudly steals elements from Rear Window, The Conversation, and Blow Out, it does so very artfully, and with a good understanding of what […]
The text “A fable from a true tragedy” is the very first message that Spencer has for us, and this tells us the most important thing we need to know about it. Namely, this is not a biopic of Diana, Princess of Wales, but an impressionistic psychodrama based on the material of her largely unhappy […]
It Comes at Night could be the title of a horror film, or of a pornographic parody of a horror film. In actuality, It Comes at Night is neither of these, though it’s not above pretending that horror might be in the offing. And if you’re willing to be flexible enough with definitions that a […]
1968, the bright dividing line between contemporary and classic horror – in the autumn of that year, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead brought terrifyingly explicit violence and gore to the genre and things change forever. But that groundbreaking horror classic was beat to theaters by a few months by a film whose […]
1975’s The Stepford Wives has long since become one of those movies for which the twist ending of its central mystery has become the single thing that most people know about it. This is never a fair place for a work of narrative art to find itself, but it’s especially unfortunate for this film, which […]
Every week 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: a twofer! With Paranoia, we have a thriller about a man whose job has unexpectedly thrust him into the […]
I’ll tell you what one does not expect of a thriller produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, directed by Tony Scott, and starring Will Smith, released in 1998 when Smith, for one, was at his all-time most commercially marketable: that it would predict, so casually that it’s almost banal, one of the biggest U.S. domestic policy shitstorms […]
2012 marks the eighth year that Amanda Seyfried has been a Young Actress to Watch, following the one-two punch of her supporting performances in Mean Girls and Veronica Mars, and at some point those of us in her cheering section are probably going to get the message and go home. Maybe if they do an […]
