I’m honestly quite glad I was never much of a fan of Tom and Jerry, the cat-and-mouse slapstick cartoon series started by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera in 1940. Because if I was, I can only imagine how much more disgusted I would be by what has happened to the characters and the franchise since […]
There’s only really thing a late-career Liam Neeson action movie has to do, which is show Liam Neeson engaged with the business of doing action. Not a high bar, and yet somehow, Honest Thief does not succeeded in clearing it. The subjective, simplistic word “boring” is the single worst one for any critic to ever […]
The Father is the most miraculous kind of film adaptation of a theater piece: one that’s almost impossible to imagine being staged live. In principle, sure, one can ponder how this exact screenplay might be fitted into a theatrical space, and how it could use stagecraft to get at the same sense of slithery, unstable […]
Among the very first conversations – maybe even the first conversation – in Supernova finds an old couple, Sam (Colin Firth) and Tusker (Stanley Tucci) lightly sniping at each other over Sam’s driving, and his refusal to ever shift out of a low gear to actually start moving the RV they’re in at something resembling […]
In two entirely unrelated ways, I Care a Lot perfectly showcases two of the foremost aesthetic limitations facing contemporary cinema. The simpler one to talk about is that it’s just really damn gross-looking, with the kind of chintzy digital cinematography that has come to define so many direct-to-streaming films (it has been divvied up between […]
A review requested by Jack, 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 anecdote that I think most faultlessly sums up everything there is to say about The Transformers: The […]
Just rolling around a phrase like “Paul W.S. Anderson’s best movie” feels a little bit idiotic. Being “good” isn’t part of the point; being an enormous, ludicrous spectacle of the most unapologetically gaudy nonsense that a middle-aged video game nerd thinks is “cool” is the point. And this is why the most important Anderson text […]
I have had cause to mention multiple times now that the tradition of regarding Fanny and Alexander as Ingmar Bergman’s final film is almost entirely a matter of sophistry, but the biggest sophist of all was Ingmar Bergman himself. When his 1984 telefilm After the Rehearsal was released theatrically basically everywhere in the world other […]
Right from its mouthful of a title, Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar is a comedy very much unlike anything that ordinarily gets made these days. For one thing, it is very obvious that it had a screenplay, and that the actors said the words from the screenplay as they were on set, […]
Part of me thinks the best thing to do is just to point to the star rating and then tell you only exactly what I knew about Shadow in the Cloud before I sat down to watch it: it’s a World War II movie starring Chloë Grace Moretz as some manner of airwoman, it has […]
A review requested by Kevin, 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! I liked I ♥ Huckabees in 2004, and would most likely have given it a 4/5 review then; […]
The great Polish director Agnieszka Holland is in the pantheon of European master filmmakers whose work we are more or less required to grapple with, if we take seriously the idea that cinema is an art form. And in this light, it’s not surprising that Mr. Jones, a political history lesson that premiered at the […]
