It is well to begin by being fair, and acknowledging that Groupers is a very small movie with a very, very small budget. And this is not something that you’d necessarily be able to guess just by looking at it, or listening to it. First-time writer-director-producer Anderson Cowan has soared past the biggest challenge facing […]
It is entirely possible that no first-time film director of the 21st Century to date was so transparently ecstatic to be making a movie as Rob Zombie was with 2003’s House of 1000 Corpses. It is the work of an unmitigated enthusiast. Much of that enthusiasm is for the entire corpus of horror cinema; it’s […]
The only word to describe The Peanut Butter Falcon is “nice”. I use the word “only” literally. Niceness is the film’s defining characteristic: it was made for nice reasons, it is nice to its characters (who are nice people), it is nice to its audience. It is not in any way interesting. It feels like […]
Brittany Forgler (Jillian Bell) is a well-observed, well-played, interestingly itchy character. She is, indeed, more interesting than Brittany Runs a Marathon knows what to do with. The film very obviously wanted nothing else but to be a lighthearted inspirational story drawn from life – Brittany O’Neill, to whom all this happened, is a friend of […]
“I like movies. Old ones. Back when they knew what they were doing,” says Ed Hemsler (John Lithgow), star of The Tomorrow Man, and you know what? I totally agree with that. Also, if you want a really clear-cut example of the kind of movie that gets made now, when they don’t know what they’re […]
I had supposed (and was even prepared not to be annoyed by it) that The Farewell was going to turn out to be overhyped, if only because the hype has been so damn loud. And this is only a tiny bit true. It has, however, been incorrectly hyped. To judge from many of the reviews, […]
A review requested by John Taylor, 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! First things first: form dictates that I give this film a star rating, and I want you […]
Intermittently 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: Disney’s new version of The Lion King presents painstakingly animated photorealistic CGI lions milling about doing lion shit. This might […]
Intermittently 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: Crawl, brings back to the big-screen the ancient rivalry between human and alligator. There have been more than a few […]
There are multiple versions of 1973’s The Wicker Man, but the one that has been easiest to see for most of the film’s existence is 88 minutes long. This might not matter, since you’re not reading a review of The Wicker Man, but here’s the thing: Midsommar is basically The Wicker Man with the serial […]
I would certainly not want The Dead Don’t Die to be anybody’s first exposure to director Jim Jarmusch, but since it has an unusually wide release for that director, and an unusually friendly genre for that director (it’s a comic zombie movie), and a seemingly endless list of famous people in the cast, it seems […]
Not one solitary thing is fresh about Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and I’m not sure how far back in time you’d have to go for that statement not to be true. Even if you got as far back as 1991-1993, when the film takes place, I think people would be unimpressed by how much […]
