It had to happen eventually: Steven Soderbergh has at last made a film that I just don’t like at all. Unsane, the director’s second film in his un-retirement, following the lanky heist film Logan Lucky, is the latest in the proud tradition of Full Frontal, Bubble, and The Girlfriend Experience: a film made to be as […]
The pleasures of 2013’s Pacific Rim are not extreme, but they do exist, mostly because of the unstinting pleasure director Guillermo del Toro self-evidently took in his fantasy of giant robots squaring off against giant alien monsters. It stands to reason that the absence of del Toro means the absence of that pleasure and lo! […]
A 7-years-later sequel to Gnomeo & Juliet sounds like a joke, I would say. Except it doesn’t even. If it were a joke, it would be one with a punchline that nobody could get, because who the hell remembers that Gnomeo & Juliet exists? It’s an entry in a spirited game of “who can remember […]
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool was maybe the most Oscarbaity Oscarbait of 2017,* and to a large extent it lives down to that expectation. It’s the story of how 57-year-old Gloria Grahame (Annette Bening), Oscar-winning actress and star of at least two rock-solid film noir masterpieces (1950’s In a Lonely Place, directed by her […]
A review requested by KayMartha12, 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! All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 is utterly confounding. For multiple reasons, only one of which is that […]
If there is one great huge problem with Forgotten, and I rather feel like “problem” is a bit of a leading word, it’s that the film is nakedly, overwhelmingly anxious to remind you of Oldboy. And surely, Oldboy is a wonderful movie, so that’s an understandable impulse, but we’re still stuck with a film that, […]
A review requested by Yourself, 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! How to go about discussing the 1964 Kwaidan? It’s historically important as the first Japanese horror movie to […]
There are “right now” movies, and there are movies you expect will live on and linger for all time. It’s not, I don’t think, an insult to A Fantastic Woman, the 2017 Berlinale competitor and winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, to say that it’s 100% a “right now” movie, and it will […]
Red Sparrow is real dumb. We can and shall go into why that is the case, but it seemed important to get that read into the record as soon as possible. I cannot say how much of that dumbness was intrinsic to the 2013 source novel by Jason Matthews, and how much was introduced by […]
“Some books just can’t be adapted into movies” is a chintzy cop-out. But some books just can’t be adapted into movies, and A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal-winning 1962 spiritual fantasy novel for children is an easy inclusion on that list. It would be easy enough to suppose that the book’s litany of […]
The opening scene of On Body and Soul – winner of the Golden Bear at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival, and the tenth Hungarian film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film – is so unbelievably damn good that it makes one want to root for the whole movie […]
It is maybe a sign of the state of film comedy more than a sign of the quality of Game Night that I was so besotted with it. Yet besotted I was. Here we have a modern, American-made comedy that has [voice drops down to a conspiratorial whisper] a structured narrative. It also has persistent visual […]
