DreamWorks Animation, once the unlovely home of such crimes against animation as Shark Tale and Bee Movie, has been quietly handing Disney and Pixar their asses on a platter for so long now that it should no longer come as a surprise when it happens, but it still feels like Puss in Boots: The Last […]
There are those filmmakers whose artistic focus is so much on the creation of deeply over-designed worlds and heightened visual style, and so little on anything resembling tight storytelling and naturalistic emotions (I am, to be clear, not saying that this is a bad thing), that learning they are about to make their very first […]
A review requested by Harold, 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! We cannot say of the 2002 miniseries Dinotopia that it has small ambitions. Packed into its three parts, […]
Due to unforeseen circumstances, I wound up watching The School for Good and Evil in two sections: the first hour and fifteen minutes in one go, the remaining hour and ten minutes a while later. After section one, I thought the negative critical reception seemed unfair. Sure, the CGI wolf heads attached to the guard […]
To wrap up the summer movie season, 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 wide-release film from the last few weeks. From August 12: Mack & Rita explores the comedic potentials of what happens when a woman […]
The 1940 feature-length animated adaptation of Pinocchio is one of the crown jewels of American cinema. It is perhaps the most lustrous, richly-colored and -textured of all hand-drawn and hand-painted animated films, as much an example of fine art given the illusion of life through 24 frames-per-second movement as it is just another cartoon – […]
George Miller’s directorial career, which only now arrives at Feature Film #10, 43 years after his debut, consists basically of only weird movies and very weird movies, which should make me pause before saying that Three Thousand Years of Longing is the weirdest, and yet here we are. This is, effectively, his “one for me” […]
“[This thing] is like [this other thing]” is tawdry, cheap criticism, and when the things are both from a foreign culture to the critic writing the comparison, it is tawdry, cheap, and risks revealing a profound ignorance and limited frame of reference. Granting that, The Deer King is very much like Princess Mononoke. To pretend […]
There are things in Thor: Love and Thunder – the fourth movie to exclusively focus on the Marvel Comics version of the Norse god Thor, played by Chris Hemsworth, who thus becomes the first individual character to headline a tetralogy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – that are pretty damn good. And conversely, there are […]
Every week this 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 one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: at a sufficiently far remove, Thor: Love and Thunder is ultimately based on the legends and mythology of Northern […]
Five films into a series that hasn’t really shown any signs of losing its audience is an odd time to decide to course-correct for quality; even less so when the series is the signature franchise of Illumination, an animation studio that has never yet indicated that it feels terribly worried about quality in any meaningful […]
I don’t know what was going on in 2018, but the odds of this happening twice seems too high for it to be pure coincidence: a long-running slasher film franchise that had gotten snarled on insoluble convoluted and self-contradicting inter-film continuity rebooted itself by tossing out everything that had created that snarl, making a new […]
