I wonder if I could possibly get away with calling Ingrid Goes West a psychological horror film? A psychological thriller, for certain. Which I mention because I do feel like that’s been lost a little bit in the discussion that has taken place all around the movie, which seems mostly content to treat the film […]
The stream of micro-budget pseudo-Amityville pictures became a raging river in 2016. This was, I assume, because smart rip-off artists figured that they’d be able to take advantage of Amityville: The Awakening, which was set to be released at two different occasions that year (and then bright and early in 2017), sadly forgetting the gypsy […]
The only time that an animated movie will ever be made with the raw emotional potency of Takahata Isao’s Grave of the Fireflies, for Studio Ghibli, it will be at the very end of the universe, since two such profound motion pictures could not co-exist. Still, Katabuchi Sunao’s In this Corner of the World comes […]
I was all set. I had this whole thing I was going to do where I complained about how the Weinstein Company took what was self-evidently not a very great film in the form of the French animated film Ballerina, and made it even worse in remolding it for the U.S. market as Leap!, but […]
It might be a fun idea to think up ways to tell the same basic biographical story depicted in Birth of the Dragon – in 1964, on the brink of his explosion into pop culture stardom with TV’s The Green Hornet in 1966, San Francisco-based Wing Chun master Bruce Lee (Philip Ng) squared off with visiting […]
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: once again, filmmakers have failed to do a decent job of giving Bruce Lee a biopic with Birth of […]
Sight-unseen, my expectation (not unfairly, I think) was that Wind River would be a terrific screenplay with undistinguished directing holding it back. After all, the screenplay was by Taylor Sheridan, whose first film as writer was 2015’s excellent Sicario, and whose second was 2016’s sturdy, elegantly classical Hell or High Water. And the direction is […]
The concept of Colossal is so irresistible, it’s almost impossible to believe that a movie as fumbling as Colossal could have possibly been made out of it. Herein is the story of a woman named Gloria (Anne Hathaway), who has succeeded in fucking up her whole adulthood as a New York-based writer due to alcohol, […]
A review requested by Not Fenimore, 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! The title of Bon Cop, Bad Cop is something of an entrance exam. Do you understand why […]
I thought about opening with some variation on “More like “The Shitman’s Bodyguard“, but that’s really not fair. The Hitman’s Bodyguard isn’t very good, indeed may very well be shit, but I take no pleasure in calling attention to it for such a failing. It’s much sadder and pathetic as a bad movie than monstrously […]
The 2010s have produced only a scant number of horror movies more top-to-bottom objectionable than 2014’s Annabelle, the flagrantly unnecessary prequel about an absurdly overdesigned haunted doll first seen in 2013’s The Conjuring. And given the repeated threats in the last couple of years that production companies Atomic Monster and New Line Cinema want to […]
One must be careful about using words like “nadir” to discuss a series when one has not seen all of the entries yet – especially when the series spent as much time in micro-budget direct-to-video hell as the loose-knit Amityville pictures have – but my God, if The Amityville Playhouse, AKA The Amityville Theater, isn’t […]
