A review requested by Gavin, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. The first question that I think would be at the forefront of anyone’s mind upon a first viewing of Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night would be “how could such a thing possibly have come into being in […]
The question of Dakota Johnson is one I am not prepared to answer. Is she, in any conventional sense, a “good” actor? I honestly don’t know if there’s enough evidence to judge. She is, I think, a very disrespectful actor: when she is handed a bum script, as she has been handed one with Madame […]
As of the year of our Lord 2024, there have been three complete film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, which is a decent number for a book widely regarded as “unfilmable”. One of these, the 1984 Dune directed by David Lynch, is almost completely ineffective as a narrative film, but it sort of […]
If you have set yourself the task of making a movie prequel to probably Roald Dahl’s best-known children’s book, 1964’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and what you are actually doing is making a prequel to the 1971 film based on that book, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but six of one, half-dozen of […]
The phrase “generous to a fault” irresistibly suggests itself in connection with the feature film Barbie, a combination of toy commercial, exercise in feminist critical theory, anti-capitalist satire, and celebration of the ennobling power of consumerism directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, who certainly deserves some credit for having been assigned an almost impossible unfair […]
A review requested by Avshalom, 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! What a bizarre coincidence befell Paramount Pictures and Hollywood at large in 1990: two of the five Best […]
It’s odd to say of Insidious: The Red Door, no less than the fifth film in a series, “that sure seems like an unnecessary sequel”, but the Insidious series has followed a crooked path. First there was Insidious, which premiered in 2010 but for all intents and purposes is a 2011 film, and it was […]
If anything makes me happy about the existence of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a bloated and dour attempt at nostalgia-scraping that primarily demonstrates that there really probably wasn’t any artistically valid reason to give the swashbuckling archaeologist his third consecutive “grand farewell tour” in a series that only runs to five films, […]
We are living in a golden age of movies for children that present metaphorical parables about racism, in which the metaphor is horrendously bad and probably makes the pro-racism argument more effectively than the anti-racism argument. Not a good thing to have a golden age of. But anyway, here were are with the 27th feature […]
As of its auspicously-numbered 13th feature, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, two of the three best features ever made by Illumination are its two most recent films (Minions: The Rise of Gru was the last one), so maybe we stand at the dawn of a new run of quality projects from that studio, during which […]
It’s not, like, at all hard to identify the core strengths of 2019’s Shazam!: a slightly ramshackle, Amblin-in-the-’80s approach to family-friendly fantasy, and the odd bidirectional chemistry between Jack Dylan Grazer as nerdy teen Freddy Freeman, and Asher Angel and Zachary Levi tag-teaming as, respectively, the scrawny teen and massive superhero versions of Billy Batson, […]
The low-hanging fruit first: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is complete garbage as an Ant-Man movie. 2015’s Ant-Man and 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp are two of the most perfectly-matched films in the vast corpus of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, now arriving at its 31st feature film, providing almost identical experiences, and in their offbeat […]
