In the thirteen years since James Cameron’s last new feature, Avatar, I have increasingly come to treasure his particular mode of popcorn filmmaking, which I feel didn’t used to be rare, but basically has been dead as dead can be for all of those thirteen years. It is a mode of complete, unyielding sincerity, mixed […]
Return to the complete Columbo index History remembers the 1968 telefilm Prescription: Murder as the de facto pilot episode of Columbo, one of television’s most beloved detective series, but this was neither the intent nor, really, the function of the movie. And its path to its first airing on NBC, on 20 February 1968, in no […]
Other than the made-for-television movie Prescription: Murder, all reviews of Columbo are exclusive for Patreon subscribers. Click here to support Alternate Ending through Patreon. Prescription: Murder (20 February, 1968) A- Pilot Ransom for a Dead Man (1 March, 1971) B Season 1 (1971-1972) Murder by the Book (15 September, 1971) A Death Lends a Hand (6 […]
At first glance, Laura Poitras’ latest documentary appears to represent a stark change of pace. In a directorial career that dates back almost 20 years, she’d worked exclusively in the political arena, making docs about the U.S. occupation of Iraq (My Country, My Country), America’s abuses in pursuit of the “war on terror” (The Oath), […]
Bones and All, the seventh feature film directed by Luca Guadagnino, is kind of about cannibalism, and this is where it gets itself into trouble. No film should be “kind of” about cannibalism. Some subjects just don’t allow for half measures. You should never walk out of a film whose protagonists are cannibals – bisexual […]
In all my movie-going years, I have only very rarely encountered a film whose entire conceit screamed “come here and eat this huge plate of raw lima beans, because this is extremely serious and important” the way that She Said does. It’s a ripped-from-the-headlines story with the uncommon twist that we can point directly to […]
The most obvious way to sum up Violent Night – and when I say “most obvious”, I mean “so obvious that the film itself does so, explicitly” – is that it combines modern cinema’s two foremost Christmas classics that aren’t really in any significant way about Christmas, 1988’s Die Hard and 1990’s Home Alone, and […]
When the Walt Disney Company dabbles in family-friendly science fiction, catastrophe follows. Around the turn of the 1980s, they tried to get in on that Star Wars action, with The Black Hole and TRON in 1979 and 1982. Soon after both flopped, the company was taken over in a hostile coup, as the animation division […]
The Fabelmans is full of striking images. It is, in a sense, a film about striking images. Perhaps the most striking of all, to me, comes somewhat far into the movie – it is maybe even a spoiler to talk about it. But I’m not sure how much you can “spoil” The Fabelmans: the story […]
