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! So here we are, face-to-face with the all-time worst winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. […]
Inside every adult fan of musical theater is a teenage fan of musical theater, and like a lot of such teenagers, I had my Andrew Lloyd Webber phase. Which is why, even though the phrase “the best Andrew Lloyd Webber musical” feels to me now a little bit like saying “the funniest migraine I ever […]
The Shining, the motion picture from 1980, is better than The Shining, the novel from 1977, but I will concede the point that the latter is an awfully good read even so, one of the best books ever written by Stephen King. Meanwhile, Doctor Sleep, the 2013 sequel to the 1977 novel (and pointedly not […]
The Addams family has existed in multiple forms, but the three big ones that have made the most impact on culture are, in order, the New Yorker cartoons drawn by Charles Addams across several decades in the middle of the 20th Century, the 1964-’66 television sitcom that gave the characters names and an undying theme […]
The mid-budget serious prestige drama has become an endangered species in 2010s cinema, we all know this. It’s a shame, but it has at least one positive benefit, which is that classic Oscarbait has become less common over the past few years. Oh, there are still the usual cradle-to-grave biopics and literary adaptations and Commentaries […]
“This means, sadly, that the inevitable It: Chapter 2 will have almost nothing but the shitty parts.” -Me, reviewing It, 725 days ago Call it a self-fufilling prophecy if you need to, but sure enough, It: Chapter Two is pretty much nothing but the shitty parts. It is a little upsetting to find how little […]
When one of the greatest working directors of actors and one of the greatest working actors collaborate on their first film together, it is extremely easy to get one’s expectations all riled up. And this much at least can’t be denied about Where’d You Go, Bernadette: Cate Blanchett (for she is the actor) is splendid, […]
I’m sure someone, somewhere, was devoting all their time and energy to hoping that the x-treme, edgy, snottily nihilistic strand of ’90s pop culture was going to come roaring back lo these twenty years later, and for that person, I am happy to say that the new Hellboy feature is waiting for them. How x-treme, […]
The second feature adaptation of Stephen King’s 1983 horror novel Pet Sematary, following a 1989 version that is no classic but has its admirers, possesses three important qualities. One, it has a fog machine, and it’s not afraid to use it, especially when that fog can be backlit to curl across the obviously, appealingly fake […]
A review requested by Andrew Johnson, 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! There is an internal crisis that probably just about every film reviewer who uses a rating scale […]
The script for what eventually became the simply awful comedy Holmes & Watson was first announced in 2008. After a couple of cast changes, the project was shot in 2017 and delayed twice before appearing as one of the least-merry films that could possibly have opened on Christmas Day, 2018. That decade weighs heavily on […]
