Exhibit No. whatever in the continued softening of Pixar Animation Studios: Coco, the company’s 19th feature film in 22 years, and a film that would be the pride and joy of literally any other American animation studio. And yet even after so many years of such unexceptionally fine output, I keep wanting them to still […]
A previous version of this review appeared at the Film Experience. Loving Vincent opens with two different title cards. The first talks about the labor practice involved in making the movie, and the second tells us what the movie is about. And that’s pretty much exactly the right order: this is very much a movie […]
A review requested by Chere Evans, 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 word “weird” is among the vaguest and therefore least useful terms in art criticism. It is […]
So, what do you think used to be the most boring comic book movie ever made? Superman Returns? Iron Man 2? Green Lantern? The Amazing Spider-Man? X-Men: Apocalypse? Anyway, it doesn’t actually matter, because now we have Justice League, and that settles it. For right now (and I’m not optimistic enough to suppose it will stay […]
It is quite impossible for Mudbound to be a mere 134 minutes long, and I’m not sure if it is the film’s great strength that it manages to cram such an unrelenting quantity of stuff into that running time, or if perhaps there is some other world where it clocked in at three hours and […]
After three exemplary art house character studies (Reprise, Oslo, August 31, Louder Than Bombs), it’s fair that director Joachim Trier would finally put a foot wrong. And even there, I’m overstating things: if every time a filmmaker messed up, the results were still as amazing as Thelma (for that is the name of Trier’s fourth feature), cinema […]
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! No matter what the industry might like to say about itself every year at the Oscar, Hollywood […]
I think it is time to draw Cartoon Saloon into the company of the great animation studios of the modern day. It’s not just that with The Breadwinner, a sober-minded tale of the life of a girl in Afghanistan during the height of Taliban control, makes it three-for-three good or great features from Cartoon Saloon, […]
Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was just about every last little thing I want out of a directorial debut: technically adept and hugely gorgeous, full of left-field concepts, and just limited enough in some really obvious ways that it was easy to hope that her next one would be […]
This much we must credit to Devil’s Whisper: it’s certainly not a typical “the creepy old gewgaw has a demon attached” picture, no matter how much it shares the essential beats of one. It’s a movie very much about religion, for one thing (which isn’t quite the same as calling it a religious movie), which […]
A review requested by John Taylor, 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! My God, is it possible I’ve been at this reviewing thing for more than 12 years, and […]
I suspect, with absolutely nothing to back it up besides anecdotal data and hunches, that Murder on the Orient Express, from 1934, is Agatha Christie’s best-known mystery novel; or at least the best-known title to one of her mystery novels, which is the same thing as far as film producers go. And yet here we […]
