Every Wes Anderson film is “quirky”, but I think with Isle of Dogs – the director’s ninth feature film in 22 years – we’ve finally gotten to the first one that’s just flat-out fucking weird. Whether it is the good kind of weird or the not-so-good kind is not a question I expect to resolve […]
Steven Spielberg has indicated during the press tour for Ready Player One that it had, alongside Jaws and Saving Private Ryan, one of the very hardest shoots of any film he’s ever directed. I think this is a slightly odd claim to make publicly – “this shoot was a grueling misery and it took everything […]
“Some books just can’t be adapted into movies” is a chintzy cop-out. But some books just can’t be adapted into movies, and A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal-winning 1962 spiritual fantasy novel for children is an easy inclusion on that list. It would be easy enough to suppose that the book’s litany of […]
Annihilation feels like it might be the most Alex Garland thing that Alex Garland has written. The writer’s sixth screenplay – the second that he has directed – is the embodiment of all his most characteristic traits: it is far more interested in ideas than characters, it’s infatuated with the scientific processes at the heart […]
Passionate filmmakers are good, because without passion you have hackwork. And so, QED, passion projects are good, because they are the place where filmmakers devote the greatest part of their energy, creativity, and soul. On the other hand, passion projects can also trigger a kind of blindness from artists so deeply in love with their […]
Barring some major and wholly unexpected change, I suspect that Black Panther is the best film Marvel Studios is capable of making right now, and will never be topped in the future. That’s not really much of a compliment, though it’s enough to make me (with some vague resentment and suspicion that I’ll regret it […]
Exhibit No. whatever in the continued softening of Pixar Animation Studios: Coco, the company’s 19th feature film in 22 years, and a film that would be the pride and joy of literally any other American animation studio. And yet even after so many years of such unexceptionally fine output, I keep wanting them to still […]
A review requested by Chere Evans, 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! The word “weird” is among the vaguest and therefore least useful terms in art criticism. It is […]
Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was just about every last little thing I want out of a directorial debut: technically adept and hugely gorgeous, full of left-field concepts, and just limited enough in some really obvious ways that it was easy to hope that her next one would be […]
It’s going to sound like I’m crabbing and bitching and pissing and moaning and harboring all sorts of ill will towards Blade Runner 2049, so let me please clarify one important thing: it’s a fine movie. And that’s already most of the battle won. Given the uncountable number of ways that a decades-later sequel to […]
A review requested by Caleb Wimble, with thanks for 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! Having been born in 1981, I am from a very precise generational cohort that is now and […]
The list of movies that owe a huge debt to Blade Runner is damn near inexhaustible, but even so, it’s been a real long time since the last film that drew upon that film’s iconic production design so blatantly and desperately as the 2017 version of Ghost in the Shell. More, indeed, than the film […]
