In a decade that was great for rich-looking animated features from Japan, 2016’s A Silent Voice is one of the richest. It’s a small-scale human drama, with a main character who has become so pent-up and insular that he can barely interact with the world around him, taking place in a reasonably small number of […]
Barbara Stanwyck – the most sarcastic, mercilessly incisive leading lady of her generation, a biting sophisticate in the body of a tough dame. Samuel Fuller – the great journalist-director whose films have the precision and authenticity of a no-bullshit reporter, with the sensationalism of a man who knows the best way to get people to […]
2004’s Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid is pretty fucking dumb. So what? 1997’s Anaconda is also pretty fucking dumb, and is nevertheless one of the most entertaining creature features of its decade. But there is one extremely important difference between the two films: Anaconda had Jon Voight giving one of the most unapologetically […]
When a film has a title like My Summer of Love, it wouldn’t be unreasonably to expect a languorous, stretched-out mood, slightly lazy and slightly warm and prone to lingering on moments. None of this is the case. The actual My Summer of Love that exists – a 2004 film that gave Emily Blunt her […]
It says something – and as a contented old atheist, I hardly know if I’m in a position to say what, but it’s something – that The Last Temptation of Christ could have the theologically promiscuous fatherhood of an Italian Catholic director working from a screenplay that a Calvinist writer adapted from a 1955 novel […]
The 2016 film Trolls isn’t flawless by any means, but it is, nonetheless, one of crucial films in the late development of DreamWorks Animation. It was the first film the studio released after a major restructuring took place that fundamentally changed its financial strategy, and while Trolls was itself largely a product of the previous […]
A review requested by Brian, 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 hard not to respect Cruel Intentions for playing its game so well. We have here the collision […]
There’s no way around the elephant in the room, so it’s best just to start with it, and clear it out: yes, Shakespeare in Love won the Oscar for Best Picture, and because of that, Saving Private Ryan did not. If you click on that link and compare my star ratings, you’ll note that I […]
To translate Belladonna of Sadness into an American context, imagine that Walt Disney, after building his empire, got bored, quit the company that bore his name, and went off to make Fritz the Cat. That’s basically what happened with Tezuka Osamu, who is often (reductively) called the father of manga, largely on the basis of […]
One thing that nobody can take away from Bacurau, the third feature directed by Brazilian art house favorite Kleber Mendonça Filho (co-directing here alongside his former production designer Juliano Dornelles): it’s unpredictable. The film wear so many hats over the course of its 131 minutes, sometimes wearing them on top of each other, that it’s […]
1935’s The Whole Town’s Talking is a weird movie. All the weirder still, because it doesn’t in the slightest bit act like it’s weird. But here’s what we’ve got: a variation of The Prince and the Pauper set inside of a ’30s gangster picture, that spends its first act looking for all the world like […]
Anaconda begins with a text crawl so deliriously full of bullshit that I cannot possibly resist quoting it in full: Tales of monstrous, man-eating Anacondas have been recounted for centuries by tribespeople of the Amazon Basin, some of whom are said to worship these giant snakes. Anacondas are among the most ferocious – and enormous […]
