I probably shouldn’t have come out of Netflix’s A Castle for Christmas with the strongest emotion in my soul being resentment for Shakespeare in Love, but the heart despises what it despises. It’s not like Shakespeare in Love is even a bad movie, I just feel it’s responsible for films about authors coming up with […]
There are many indelible moments sprinkled across the 128 minutes of The Power of the Dog, writer-director Jane Campion’s first feature film in the twelve long years since 2009’s Bright Star (which was itself her first film in the six long years since 2003’s In the Cut, so if I am doing the math right, […]
This is a statement that will maybe mean something only to me, but the Princess Switch franchise has had the exact opposite trajectory of the A Christmas Prince movies. Instead of starting with a bland Hallmark knockoff and gradually backsliding into pure, effervescent lunacy, these ones started off as a fever dream riff on The Prince […]
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! As the pinch hitter critic here at Alternate Ending, it is my honor and privilege to take you on a guided tour through the best and worst of the terrible Christmas movies that get disgorged onto an unsuspecting public by the uncaring maw of Netflix every year. […]
I don’t know that the mission of Alternate Ending necessarily counts talking about the video recordings of stage productions; personally, I don’t “count” them as movies, and while I suppose in a pinch you could call them a type of documentary, that feels like a cheat. But one does not wish to encounter something so […]
“No, not Janey Briggs. She’s got glasses. And a ponytail. Ugh, she’s got paint on her overalls!” Thus ensue the immortal lines spoken by Chris Evans in Not Another Teen Movie that slew the savage beast that was 1999’s She’s All That, the teen movie that was brave enough to take the stance that any ugly […]
It’s been a long year. You don’t need me to tell you that. There’s nobody on this planet who hasn’t been touched by the COVID-19 pandemic, in ways large or small. But some of those people have platforms. Some of those people with platforms are using that to aid people who need it the most. […]
“Movies are so rarely great art,” Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, “that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.” I do not agree with much of what Kael had to say over the years, and in fact I do not even agree with large swaths of […]
When confronted with a story as vigorously trashy as the one underlying The Woman in the Window – adapted from the 2018 novel by A.J. Finn, the pen name of Daniel Mallory, a book editor who very openly described how the book came about as a compendium of every trope in popular post-Gone Girl crime […]
The worst thing we can say about Oxygen is that it is a very gimmicky thriller based on an overfamiliar gimmick, but done by a director with a skill set extremely well-positioned to make the most of that gimmick, and starring an actor who wrings everything she possibly out of basically only three elements (her […]
There is very little inherently interesting about Things Heard & Seen, a movie about which the strongest emotional response I have had is frustration at the almost gravitational pull that I have towards typing out the title as Things Seen & Heard, having to bodily force myself on the right track every time. Or that […]
The opening sequence of Stowaway, a new science fiction thriller by director Joe Penna that’s much heavier on the “science” than “thriller”, is a top-notch bit of space travel filmmaking that calls to mind all the best examples of the form from Apollo 13 to First Man; the last sequence is ginned-up sentimental horseshit that […]
