Way back in the foggy mists of 2015, the world was graced with Fifty Shades of Grey, a film that found a way to make BDSM dull as dishwater. And so, first principles: at least Fifty Shades Darker isn’t quite as boring. It’s not not-boring. But compared to the first film, it possesses at least […]
The multi-media franchise known under the broad name of Power Rangers in the United States (a substantially revised localisation of the even bigger franchise called Super Sentai in Japan) has been through so many iterations and revisions along the way, why not a franchise-starting action movie remake? Albeit one that seems to have pretty securely […]
“A terrifying disease acting as a mild impediment to a youthful romance” is a firmly established genre, and I’m not sure that I’d ever have been able to explain why, but it’s the world we live in. And insofar as that’s the world we live in, I am grateful for the likes of Everything, Everything, […]
If nothing else, Friend Request has the decency to be a fascinating object. Not a fascinating film, let me please clarify that right off. It’s all in the weirdly unclassifiable thing that the project is. This is an entirely German production, directed by Simon Verhoeven, scion of a fairly well-established directing family (no relationship to […]
In what surely counts among the least-surprising developments of the 2017 movie year, it turns out that you can’t keep making the same feature-length commercial over and over again with the same plot and the same jokes, and expect that it’s going to keep working out. 2014’s The Lego Movie remains a modern miracle for […]
A review requested by reader WBTN, with thanks for 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! Every film tells us, early on, how we are supposed to watch it,* and so it is […]
The promotional subtitle of First They Killed My Father (as well as the subtitle of the 2000 memoir from which it has been adapted) is A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, and it’s that last word, “remembers”, that ends up being the key to the whole film. With a screenplay adapted by Loung Ung and director […]
First things first: David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike are just luminous together onscreen. As the central couple of A United Kingdom, they’re bound by the conventions of both the genre (prim, awards-courting, real-life message movies) and by the time the story is set (England and the British Empire in the 1940s and 1950s), and so […]
The number of things that Beach Rats does that would ordinarily annoy the hell out of me is basically all of it. And yet. Somehow, the precise ratio of ugly-ass indie film cinematography, meandering narrative focus, and pointedly smudgy adolescent self-discovery is managed by writer-director Eliza Hittman (making her second feature; I have not seen […]
The Wall isn’t a movie so much as an amuse-bouche, and one that’s none too amusant. I rescind none of my faith in director Doug Liman, who has made a few good films, a couple of great ones, and only one that’s actually bad, 2008’s Jumper, but this first of his two 2017 releases (the […]
A review requested by reader WBTN, with thanks for 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 1961 British film The Innocents – which is either a horror film about ghosts or a […]
Whatever else we might say about it, mother! is the most Darren Aronofsky of all Darren Aronfsky films, combining at least something from every one of his previous six features. This is the point where I need to admit that I’d rank those six features on a scale from “hated it” to “that was pretty […]
