In a decade that was great for rich-looking animated features from Japan, 2016’s A Silent Voice is one of the richest. It’s a small-scale human drama, with a main character who has become so pent-up and insular that he can barely interact with the world around him, taking place in a reasonably small number of […]
A review requested by Brian, 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!. It’s hard not to respect Cruel Intentions for playing its game so well. We have here the collision […]
By this point, I think that no more evidence is necessary that Yuasa Masaaki is the most important animation director working in the world right now. But his fourth feature, Ride Your Wave, provides that evidence anyway. It’s not that it’s his best work: I would, in fact, rank it third among those four features, […]
The Sun Is Also a Star has no reason to be good at all: the teen YA romance adaptation, as a genre, is not one that has ever demonstrated a particularly robust correlation between quality and financial success, just so long as the book has a big enough fanbase and the filmmakers avoid doing too […]
Blinded by the Light is an extraordinarily nice movie. There’s a lot about it that could do with a substantial bit of tweaking, but all of its flaws come directly as a result of its niceness. And who could feel too very bad about that? Plenty of movies have flaws because they’re cynically commercial, or […]
Part of me wonders if Kevin Feige is really just sticking it to Amy Pascal for the sake of it. The whole thing about Spider-Man in movies since 2016 is a bit tedious and wrapped up with corporate nonsense, but the basic thing to keep in mind is that Columbia Pictures, a subsidiary of a […]
Most weeks 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: with Yesterday, an Oscar-winning director looks at what might happen if the medium-changing popularity of the Beatles happened here […]
Ma is the story of Sue Ann Ellington (Octavia Spencer, a fortysomething woman who still lives in the same small town in Ohio where she went to high school. So do several other people, including all of the principle figures in an exceptionally vicious prank by which the shy, introverted Sue Ann was sexually abused […]
Previously reviewed at the Film Experience Many directors have had great years, in which they’ve released two (or more!) tremendously good films that demonstrate the breadth of their skills. But very, very few directors have ever had a years like Yuasa Masaaki had in 2017. This was the year that the animation genius, whose work […]
The Miseducation of Cameron Post, the 2018 winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, is a movie that feels like it might have still felt fresh and interesting if it had come out in 1993. That’s the year in which the film is set, which is already a curious choice (inherited […]
There is exactly one thing I unreservedly admire in Slender Man: in one shot, the protagonists are huddled around a laptop, and in the background, what appears to be one of their shadows stretches and elongates in a distinctively lanky (one might even say “slender”) way, looming over them on the back wall. Everything about […]
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: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is a musical sequel to a movie that was based on a stage […]
