The biggest reason to be temperate in one’s praise of Belle, the newest film by the great animation director Hosoda Mamoru, is that this is extremely similar to a different film by the great animation director Hosoda Mamoru, 2009’s Summer Wars (and Summer Wars, in turn, has a reputation for being extremely similar to Hosoda’s […]
Return to the complete Party Down index First Airdate: March 20, 2009 Written by John Enbom, Dan Etheridge, & Paul Rudd Directed by Fred Savage It is the dawn of television here on Alternate Ending. Although movies will remain the main focus of the site, with the influx of exciting new writers around these parts, the scope […]
Netflix may be emblematic of the accelerating death of culture and the transformation of motion pictures from one of modern society’s dominant art forms into an endless churn of impersonal “content”, but every now and then they use their powers for good. To wit: the new three-part anthology film The House, in which four terrific […]
So, I’ve been working the “shitty direct-to-Netflix romcom” beat for a while, and I’m usually as happy as a pig in slop. I like to get my hands dirty digging through the mud of smooth and shiny bland filmmaking and root out the gems. Or, more frequently, the gnarled potatoes that are shaped funny and […]
So here we are, lucky number 13 – Witchcraft 13: Blood of the Chosen, to be precise. And executive producer Jerry Pfeifer (the only common link between all thirteen of those films) and the good people at Vista Street Entertainment pulled out all the stops to celebrate hitting that milestone, having become the first (and […]
There’s no reason that Sing 2 had to be better than 2016’s Sing. Illumination has gotten a lot of mileage out of putting absolutely no effort whatsoever into their movies, and their sequels have generally been the worst of a sorry lot. Not that I assume that the development meeting for Sing 2 started out […]
You wouldn’t notice it without looking at the poster, but the title of Hulu’s new teen romantic comedy Sex Appeal is meant to be a pun. Sex APPeal. Like… an app. About sex. It’s actually quite fitting, because the movie is exactly like its title, in that it’s something totally misguided and off-base that through […]
Also check out Chris’s interview with Iuli Gerbase, writer-director of The Pink Cloud As The Pink Cloud opens, on-screen text states “this film was written in 2017 and shot in 2019. Any resemblance to actual events is purely coincidental.” Knowing nothing going into the film, I thought it was strange to include comments like that […]
The fifth film in the Scream franchise has not been titled 5cream, which is all the proof you need that we live in a cruel, arbitrary universe devoid of meaning or justice. But other than that, this is a pretty snappy addition to the longrunning slasher movie franchise begun by a different movie with the […]
The paradox of Drive My Car is that nearly every individual moment within it feels like the most delicate kind of minimalism, while the film that is the sum total of all those individual moments has the grandeur of a big, sweeping epic. This is, not least, because there are almost three hours worth of […]
A review requested by Brian Fowler, 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 not at all hard for me to imagine a viewer who, upon learning that there exists […]
It’s impressive, in its way: 2022 managed to produce a worse wide-release film than the whole of 2021 on literally its very first try. The 355, the first movie of the new year, makes virtually no right choices, and arguably started that habit before pre-production, before development even, when 355 star/producer Jessica Chastain and director […]
