Nine years ago, How to Train Your Dragon became the first film to demonstrate that DreamWorks Animation could be more than The House That Shrek Built; the first film to eschew the lazy pop culture references, music cues and shticky jokes based on celebrity personae and just go out and make a rich-looking, emotionally resonant […]
Winner of the 2019 Best Picture Review poll In deference to the idea that negativity is hard on your body and mind, I would like to begin talking about A Beautiful Mind, winner of the 74th Oscar for Best Picture, with my compliment. Starting right at the studio logos, we hear a really lovely motif […]
The best parodies, I have mentioned here and there, come not from a place of superiority, but of love; they are never motivated by the desire to mock, but by a great deal of love for all of the fiddly little details of the thing being made the butt of jokes. In that spirit, let […]
Making one PG-13 slasher film that’s actually enjoyable to watch is impressive enough. Making two of them would probably require divine intervention. So it’s surely the right decision that, in crafting a follow-up to 2017’s startlingly fun and effective Happy Death Day, returning writer-director Christopher Landon would elect to use the slasher form more as […]
Producer-writer James Cameron has been nurturing a screen adaptation of Kishiro Yukito’s manga series Battle Angel Alita almost since it was first translated into English in the 1990s. And this is perhaps why Alita: Battle Angel – the every-so-slightly-worse-named feature that has finally emerged from that years-long dream – feels so much like a film […]
The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part is, I am deeply unhappy to report, a bit better than you should expect of the fourth movie in a franchise of animated comedies for children that double as toy commercials. I am unhappy to report this, because 2015’s The Lego Movie wasn’t “better than you should expect”; […]
A review requested by Andrew Johnson, 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 an internal crisis that probably just about every film reviewer who uses a rating scale […]
It’s been just a little bit more than two years since Collateral Beauty barfed its way in and out of theaters, and ever since then, it feels like we’ve been living in a golden age for astonishing cinematic boondoggles. Over the decades, the Hollywood film industry has been fine-tuned to discourage truly horrible filmmaking, and […]
I take it as self-evident that to love cinema is to love Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy, the comedy duo paired under the guidance of producer Hal Roach in the silent era and who made several wonderful short films before transitioning to sound and making several even more wonderful shorts and features in the 1930s. […]
First published, with slight alterations, at the Film Experience. Presented now during the film’s limited release in the U.S. First things first: the Brazilian animated feature Tito and the Birds is a preposterously beautiful motion picture. The film’s style is perhaps best described as looking like a digital oil painting, with swirling smears of color […]
Like many of you, I greatly enjoy John Wick and John Wick: Chapter 2. Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here, and assume that those of you who agree with me – and for that matter, those of you who do not – probably do not spend much of your time thinking, […]
Every satire of the for-profit art world makes largely the same points about that target, and Velvet Buzzsaw, the third film by writer-director Dan Gilroy, is not looking to break the habit. Oh, sure, it drags in the stuff of a slasher-style horror movie for its second hour, but it’s still basically the same thing […]
