In the very first scene of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, screenwriters J.K. Rowling and Steven Kloves make “Dumbledore is gay” canonical in the Harry Potter universe. At the far side of 142 impossibly unhurried minutes, this will turn out to have been the most consequential narrative development of the film. After three films, […]
Throughout her career, Andrea Arnold has told stories about women in constrictive circumstances who seek liberation via danger, whether that takes the form of stalking someone via CCTV monitors (Red Road), getting involved with a much older man (Fish Tank), or living in a van alongside Shia LaBeouf (American Honey). The subject of Arnold’s latest […]
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 […]
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 […]
Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac feels like it would be a perfect candidate for being turned into a musical, and indeed it would appear that exactly that transformation has happened, multiple times, in both French and English. So arguably there’s actually nothing special about the new film Cyrano, except that it is, as […]
The idea of Kenneth Branagh writing and directing a semi-autobiographical story of his childhood in Belfast, right around the time that tensions between the nationalists and loyalists in Northern Ireland broke out into open violence in 1969, is not one that fills me with any great amount of automatic optimism. Branagh is quite a sufficiently […]
I would be tempted to say that Last Night in Soho is the film with which director Edgar Wright proves that he needs somebody else to write his screenplays, but then, didn’t we kind of already know that? Specifically, that he needs Simon Pegg to write his screenplays, or co-write them, anyway: the three Wright-Pegg […]
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 […]
A review requested by Not Fenimore, 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 1985 Cannon Films production Lifeforce is two entirely different exploitation films in one. Three, if you […]
Intermittently throughout the summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a major new release. This week: David Lowery and A24 have brought us a moody art-film version of most beloved of 14th Century romances in the form […]
Intermittently throughout the summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a major new release. This week: David Lowery and A24 have brought us a moody art-film version of most beloved of 14th Century romances in the form […]
A review requested by Gavin, 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! Saint Sebastian, who according to tradition died a martyr in 288 (he was clubbed to death, having miraculously […]
