The winner of the 2018 Best Picture Review Poll There are two very different stereotypes of what kind of film wins the Best Picture Oscar, and neither of them is actually true. The kind of people whose movie-watching habits never extends to anything that isn’t a heavily-marketed wide-release blockbuster tends to suppose that Oscar-winning films […]
Passionate filmmakers are good, because without passion you have hackwork. And so, QED, passion projects are good, because they are the place where filmmakers devote the greatest part of their energy, creativity, and soul. On the other hand, passion projects can also trigger a kind of blindness from artists so deeply in love with their […]
Let us be honest: Early Man is a little bit dumb. Or it is, at any rate, so unbelievably silly that it comes off as dumb, albeit dumb on purpose. The latest film produced by the great Bristol-based Aardman Animations, and the first feature directed by the studio’s creative soul Nick Park since 2005’s Wallace […]
Barring some major and wholly unexpected change, I suspect that Black Panther is the best film Marvel Studios is capable of making right now, and will never be topped in the future. That’s not really much of a compliment, though it’s enough to make me (with some vague resentment and suspicion that I’ll regret it […]
A review requested by Benjamin, 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! Double Indemnity is the noir of noirs. To be sure, there are more typical examples of the strengths […]
The “Uncanny Valley” is a concept that comes from robotics, but which has long been applied to CG animation and digital visual effects, which suggests that the closer human simulacra come to precisely recreating the exact look of human beings, the more damnably off-putting actual human beings find the tiniest flaws in that illusion. That […]
Midway through Fifty Shades Freed, there is a scene in which a man has just been found creeping through the enormously fancy apartment where newlyweds Ana (Dakota Johnson) and Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) live and practice their increasingly non-kinky and un-erotic “BDSM lifestyle” (I don’t really know from BDSM, but I don’t believe that “ice […]
A review requested by Gabe, 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! There is, in Shakespeare criticism, an inconsistently-applied and vaguely-defined term, “problem play”, which basically means that nobody knows […]
With great pride, I present this review of the 7000th feature film I have seen. Out 1 is the Mount Everest of cinephilia. The 13-hour* serial is, depending on how you feel about definitions, possibly the longest extant narrative film (there have been several experimental films that are longer, as is Peter Watkins’s 1987 documentary […]
The filmmaking in the Maze Runner franchise keeps getting better and better with every new entry. So it’s a damn shame that Maze Runner: The Death Cure is the last one, because maybe by the time they hit, like, number 12 there’d finally be a movie worth watching. Still, let’s not go all-in on the negativity […]
The elephant in the room first: a schlocky haunted house movie with Helen Mirren is peculiar; a schlocky haunted house movie with Helen Mirren and Jason Clarke is so peculiar that it goes back around to promising. Because maybe one of them just made a bad choice for a paycheck, but both of them, simultaneously? […]
Quite independently of the quality of any of the films in question, the Cloverfield series-if-that’s-the-word-for-it has taken one of the strangest routes imaginable to willing itself into existence. Cloverfield was always just Cloverfield, and that was it for eight years, when an unrelated in-production film titled The Cellar was mildly retooled and made into 10 Cloverfield […]
