The Miseducation of Cameron Post, the 2018 winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, is a movie that feels like it might have still felt fresh and interesting if it had come out in 1993. That’s the year in which the film is set, which is already a curious choice (inherited […]
The Happytime Murders isn’t good, which is no surprise at all; but it is very close to being good, which is quite a surprise indeed. Basically, the problem is this: it’s poisonously unfunny. The film is an enthusiastic participant in the current wave of adults-only comedy, where cursing is funny, cursing in a sexualised manner […]
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: Muppets fuck in The Happytime Murders. Because humanity has fallen from God’s light, it’s no surprise that this is […]
Bad movies happen all the time. Anybody can make a bad movie: all you need is some flat dialogue, lazy cinematography, actors in over their heads, an unprepared director, poorly thought-out story beats, an inattentive editor, cheap sound equipment. Or any combination of the above. No, there’s nothing particularly interesting about a bad movie. But […]
A review requested by Paul Royar, 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! Palindromes isn’t merely an example of a kind of film we don’t really have any more, it […]
For well over a year now, ever since the first trailer for the first release date dropped, I have been curious about only one aspect of the thrice-delayed “caveboy-meets-wolf, caveboy-domesicates-the-first-dog” movie Alpha: would it be so unbelievably fucking bad that it would be a great camp classic, or would it merely be the kind of […]
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: Alpha demonstrates the time that humans first turned wolves into dogs. This relationship has been commemorated in countless artworks; […]
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: Alpha dramatises the time that humans first turned wolves into dogs. The subsequent relationship between species has been commemorated […]
Ever since the swift collapse of the romantic comedy as a major cinematic genre,* the rare examples of the form that get made and released in a visible way tend to be praised (if praised they are) for how much they feel like classic romcoms. So it has been with Crazy Rich Asians (with additional […]
In a marvelous decade for low-budget indie sci-fi, the writing-directing team of [Aaron] Moorhead & [Justin] Benson still stand out for making some of the most offbeat genre films out there. They’ve gone-three-for-three now on films that start out as a low-key character dramas about two people who like each other a lot but are […]
There is exactly one thing I unreservedly admire in Slender Man: in one shot, the protagonists are huddled around a laptop, and in the background, what appears to be one of their shadows stretches and elongates in a distinctively lanky (one might even say “slender”) way, looming over them on the back wall. Everything about […]
So here’s the thing: The Meg is actually able to concoct a reason for Jason Statham to get into hand-to-hand combat with a 75-foot shark. That is, in a sense, the whole of what the film needs to do, and I unhesitatingly admire it for this, and even love it for this, even though I’m […]
