A review requested by Benjamin Ross 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! The foremost skill of the great writer-director Billy Wilder, I think, is his ability to take […]
I will happily concede that Downton Abbey, the motion picture, does not present itself as a fans-only experience. It does not assume you have seen any or all of Downton Abbey, the 2010-2015 television series (as I have not: the unanimous opinion of every person in my life who has seen it – Series 1 […]
It is well to begin by being fair, and acknowledging that Groupers is a very small movie with a very, very small budget. And this is not something that you’d necessarily be able to guess just by looking at it, or listening to it. First-time writer-director-producer Anderson Cowan has soared past the biggest challenge facing […]
It’s been a good decade for contemplative sci-fi movies using terrific visual effects to create visually rich, touchably real depictions of space. My sense is that the earliest of these was 2009’s Moon, though of course the cycle was kicked into overdrive four years later with Gravity, and we’ve since had a nice range of […]
The mid-budget serious prestige drama has become an endangered species in 2010s cinema, we all know this. It’s a shame, but it has at least one positive benefit, which is that classic Oscarbait has become less common over the past few years. Oh, there are still the usual cradle-to-grave biopics and literary adaptations and Commentaries […]
Gavin Hood is an extremely inconsistent director (and calling the man who signed his name to X-Men Origins: Wolverine “inconsistent” is paying him a very nice big compliment, I think), but his last feature is one that left me inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Eye in the Sky, from 2015, is […]
Of all the characters who could get the “let’s check in on our old friends from years ago and see what they’re up to” sequel treatment, I would not have supposed that people who we last see dying in a stand-off with the cops would be good candidates. But underappreciated horror auteur Rob Zombie doesn’t […]
House of 1000 Corpses is an energetic, lively movie, but it is also a substantially dysfunctional one, better-suited for demonstrating writer-director Rob Zombie’s all-encompassing love for the horror genre than for working as an audio-visual narrative object. It’s the kind of first feature that a filmmaker needs to get out of their system so they […]
It is entirely possible that no first-time film director of the 21st Century to date was so transparently ecstatic to be making a movie as Rob Zombie was with 2003’s House of 1000 Corpses. It is the work of an unmitigated enthusiast. Much of that enthusiasm is for the entire corpus of horror cinema; it’s […]
Hustlers is Goodfellas. It is, in fact, so very similar to Goodfellas down to some very specific points of overlap that I don’t see how it can possibly be an accident: both involve a lot of voice-over explaining how a character went from rags to riches and only had to pay their humanity in order […]
A review requested by Nathan Morrow, 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! It’s impossible to talk about The King and the Mockingbird without talking about its torturous path into […]
The only word to describe The Peanut Butter Falcon is “nice”. I use the word “only” literally. Niceness is the film’s defining characteristic: it was made for nice reasons, it is nice to its characters (who are nice people), it is nice to its audience. It is not in any way interesting. It feels like […]
