The claims that BlacKkKlansman represents a renaissance for Spike Lee are at least slightly overheated. After all, even his very great movies are frustrating and flawed (except for Do the Right Thing, which is frustrating and perfect), and even his very bad movies are still interesting for the complexity and intensity of their ideas. There […]
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: The Meg has decided that 60 feet isn’t nearly imposing enough of a size for a giant shark and […]
Consider a movie about spies. Consider a movie, in particular, about a normal woman who is thrust into the position of having to be a spy without any real training, and so ends up fumbling her way through major European cities by a combination of dumb luck and common sense, to humorous effect. What you […]
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: the Walt Disney Company has acted for years like A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh is theirs and theirs alone, as is […]
There are, I would imagine, very few similarities between Marfa, Texas (2010 population: 1981) and Oakland, California (2010 population: 390,724). But they share this one thing: they both somehow became holy sites for filmmaking for very brief periods of time. In August 2006, Marfa was the base of operations for two different film shoots, those […]
Given the company’s current business model, it makes perfect sense that Disney would finally get around to releasing a film with the explicit message “constantly dwelling in nostalgia is good, and caring about adult things is bad”. I don’t even think I’m being ungenerous to Christopher Robin in summing it up that way; at least […]
Without a moment’s hesitation, I’d declare 2009’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself the peak of Tyler Perry’s career as a director, and in a pinch I’d call 2008’s The Family That Preys his second-best, and this matters because of one of the only characteristics they share in common: prior to 2018, they were […]
From among the Video Nasties If you were to know only the title of the film Tenebrae, you might think- actually, you would probably have no clue. Before I saw it the first time, I think I had some vague sense that it might have something to do with the spinal column, because of -brae. […]
It speaks to how quickly the words “Netflix original” have come to mean “like a direct-to-video film from the ’90s, only somehow even sadder” that a pretty straightforward thriller like Calibre seems like a small masterpiece. I mean, for God’s sake you guys, it’s a Netflix genre film that tells an interesting story with well-defined […]
A review requested by Salim Garami, 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 story of how Miami Connection came into the world warms my heart and provide me with […]
Director Debra Granik’s second feature, 2010’s Winter’s Bone, was by no means free of problems, but it was a striking, singular kind of trip to a lonely, isolated part of the United States, captured with sympathetic realism and artistic stylisation both. Between its intrinsic merits, its gratifyingly out-of-character Best Picture nomination at the Oscars, and […]
The thing that most surprises me about the Japanese animated feature Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms* is that it is not based on a manga series. Which of course should be no surprise at all, given that the vast majority of films in history have also not been based on a manga series, but […]
