A review requested by Brian, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. “The world of Canadian documentary filmmaking” is a phrase that sounds like I’m being sarcastic, or at least deadpan, but I swear I’m not – the world of Canadian documentary filmmaking is long-lived and important, one of the places […]
There are three entirely different ways we can look at Creed III, and the film is more or less of a success or a failure based on which one we pick. Starting from the most failed and going up: as the trilogy-capper to a story begun in 2015’s exceptionally great boxing movie Creed and 2018’s […]
In August 2015, four of the world’s top bridge players – Norwegians Boye Brogeland and Espen Lindqvist, and Americans Allan Graves and Richie Schwartz – announced that they were relinquishing three championship titles they had won while playing as a team in 2014 and 2015. One of these was for the 2014 Spingold Knockout Championship; […]
A review requested by Brian Fowler, 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! It’s not at all hard for me to imagine a viewer who, upon learning that there exists […]
King Richard is the kind of film designed to make you feel sweet and warm and nice while you’re watching it, with maybe just a soupçon of self-righteousness, and then to evaporate like the morning dew the literal instant that it’s over. It is a sports biopic, probably my all-time second-least-favorite kind of movie (musician […]
We’ve got to start somewhere, so why not with the question that I’ve been kicking around in my head since I finished Space Jam: A New Legacy: how can anyone worship a God vindictive and hateful enough to allow this movie to exist? No wait, that’s the other question I’ve been kicking around. The one […]
It has been nine years since director Gavin O’Connor made his last sports movie, the manfully sad “estranged brothers coping with their father’s alcholism” epic Warrior, but he still feels (to me, anyway) first and foremost like a sports movie director. This is at least in part because those nine years haven’t been full of […]
We arrive now at the only time that the Oscar for Best Picture been awarded to a single piece of music. For if there’s any other explanation for how Chariots of Fire took the top prize at the Academy Awards for 1981, I’m god-damned if I know what it might be. Nomination leader and Best […]
In 1971, actor and perilously cool individual Steve McQueen willed into existence a film about the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the most important event in international sport car racing; it is titled simply Le Mans, and it is, equally simply, one of the great race movies in history. It is mercilessly clean, focusing intently […]
Brittany Forgler (Jillian Bell) is a well-observed, well-played, interestingly itchy character. She is, indeed, more interesting than Brittany Runs a Marathon knows what to do with. The film very obviously wanted nothing else but to be a lighthearted inspirational story drawn from life – Brittany O’Neill, to whom all this happened, is a friend of […]
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: there is a grand total of one hook that they’re using to sell Good Boys: it is funny when kids […]
Creed II isn’t very good, but I cannot find it in me to feign disappointment about that. 2015’s Creed was, after all, not merely a good film: it was a miraculous film. Making a sixth sequel to 1976’s crowd-pleasing Best Picture winner Rocky 39 years after the original was a pretty dubious idea, and centering […]
