A review requested by Morgan, 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 first thing to say about the 2001 Japanese animated feature Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (generally […]
I love the horror genre. Where else are you going to get a minor classic Jamie Lee Curtis slasher (Terror Train 1980) halfheartedly remade two and a half decades later (Train 2008) before actually being remade almost word for word by Tubi another decade and a half later (Terror Train 2022), at which point it […]
More than one filmmaker has burst onto the scene with one really good horror movie and built a career out of insubstantial remakes of that one movie. So for that alone, one must extend no small amount of credit to Frank Hennenlotter, whose 1982 debut feature Basket Case was rather more than just “one really […]
Miss American Pie A review by Brennan Klein I suppose I can’t say in good conscience that American Pie Presents: Girls’ Rules is the thing I least expected to happen in 2020, but it’s at least in the top 5. Lord knows you can’t keep a good franchise down, but the last peep we heard […]
Being the best Terminator film since Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991 isn’t even a low bar to clear. It is a line painted on the ground. But I’m happy anyways that Terminator: Dark Fate is able to step across that line. It gets there largely by being the first time in four tries to […]
Toy Story 4 isn’t bad. This is, already, a huge achievement, for there was every reason in the world for it to be bad: Pixar Animation Studios has a fairly unimpressive track record with sequels and is nowhere near the regular level of absolute brilliance they were when the last film in this series, Toy […]
The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part is, I am deeply unhappy to report, a bit better than you should expect of the fourth movie in a franchise of animated comedies for children that double as toy commercials. I am unhappy to report this, because 2015’s The Lego Movie wasn’t “better than you should expect”; […]
Every week 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: Alpha demonstrates the time that humans first turned wolves into dogs. This relationship has been commemorated in countless artworks; […]
In a way, The Equalizer 2 is the absolutely perfect sequel. It’s the old-fashioned kind, where the point isn’t to recontextualise what we saw in the first film, back in 2014, to expand its universe, or to see what the ramifications are from what happened. It just tells another story using the same character doing […]
Finding Dory is definitely the best sequel made by Pixar Animation Studios without the word “toy” in the title. This is a relief, but not all that much of an achievement: Cars 2 is a visually ravishing trash fire, while Monsters University is an easy-going, wildly lazy hang-out movie that only turns on its brain […]
In retrospect, “the worst of the Captain Americas” and “the best of the Avengerses” is exactly what somebody with my tastes in Marvel movies should have expected from Captain America: Civil War, and lo and behold, that’s exactly what it is. The first film in the much-ballyhooed Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is […]
Magic Mike was one of the great surprises in 2010s cinema: a shaggy tale of male strippers starring an army of beefcake with limited (at best) acting skills that turned out to be a piercing, hurtfully insightful examination of personal financial stability in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. It is a party movie […]
