My younger readers may not recall a curious media phenomenon, a relic of the ’90s and the period when the Walt Disney Company was expanding its theme parks at a rate unmatched before or since. To promote these new attractions – Disneyland Paris, Animal Kingdom in Florida, various new rides and facelifts to existing attractions […]
The 2019 animated version of The Addams Family is remarkably free of any positive elements, including the one thing that should be considered the non-negotiable baseline for any media adaptation of Charles Addams’s macabre New Yorker cartoons: a genuine streak of cruel morbidity. It’s a children’s movie, and that of course puts a ceiling on […]
A review requested by Andrew, 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! Officially, the 2009 independent psychological sci-fi thriller After Last Season cost $5 million dollars, which is both a […]
The 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune offers one of the most interesting of all wrinkles to auteur theory, as it is generally understood. The film was the third feature directed by David Lynch, and the last before he became “David Lynch” as we now understand that phrase with 1986’s Blue […]
Author’s note, March 2024: I’m leaving my original rating intact, but in retrospect, I was hedging against the fear that Dune: Part Two, if and when it was made, would let this film down. As such a thing did not end up happening, consider this to be a 4-star review in all but name. When […]
In discussing any long-running series that doesn’t exactly swing from pole to pole, qualitywise, one of the trickiest parts in reviewing the individual entries can be figuring out where to start: what specifically makes this film different from all of those films? Happily, then, Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft – which premiered in 1998 […]
The original Brodaway production of the musical Dear Evan Hansen won six Tonys off of nine nominations, making it the single most-awarded production of the 2016-’17 season. In some years this would mean very little, but that season was an atypically competitive one for critically-acclaimed new musicals, meaning that there had to be some actual […]
When faced with the twelfth entry in a franchise that has been running for 43 years and in that time produced, if we are being spectacularly generous, four actually good entries (and I think it would be easier to defend the claim that only the very first one is actually good than that a whole […]
I don’t know that the mission of Alternate Ending necessarily counts talking about the video recordings of stage productions; personally, I don’t “count” them as movies, and while I suppose in a pinch you could call them a type of documentary, that feels like a cheat. But one does not wish to encounter something so […]
A guide to all things Bond at Alternate Ending. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga Written by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Cary Joji Fukunaga and Phoebe Waller-Bridge Premiered 28 September, 2021 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE I have to give it credit for being a basically perfect summary of the entire movie: it’s much too long, it […]
V/H/S/94 is the fourth entry in the inexplicably sprawling franchise that was spawned following the release of the first V/H/S horror anthology in 2012. The conceit of these films is that a wraparound story involves the finding of some footage, always a series of tapes, all containing horror stories filmed by handheld cameras. Like all anthologies, […]
I had a short conversation with a friend about Venom: Let There Be Carnage that seemed pretty all-encompassing: he felt that the best parts of 2018’s Venom were the scenes where Tom Hardy played off of Michelle Williams, and since there are fewer of those in Let There Be Carnage, he thought it was a […]
