Far be it from me to tell a theater full of people merrily chuckling away that what they’re laughing at isn’t funny. For it was in just such a room that I saw Eighth Grade, the first feature written by Bo Burnham, and most of the crowd was having a fun time, while I felt […]
Two devotionals, to start with. Every fan of animation in the United States really should be prostrating ourselves daily in front of a shrine dedicated to GKIDS, who is at this point the only distributor making an effort to bring the best and bravest of feature animation from around the world to get something like […]
A review requested by Erin, 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 likely to kill any modern performance of William Shakespeare’s plays is the line reading. This […]
The filmmaking in the Maze Runner franchise keeps getting better and better with every new entry. So it’s a damn shame that Maze Runner: The Death Cure is the last one, because maybe by the time they hit, like, number 12 there’d finally be a movie worth watching. Still, let’s not go all-in on the negativity […]
First things first: Jack Black, Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, and Kevin Hart, in that order, are the whole set of reasons to see Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. If none of those names stir any kind of pleasure in your heart, or worse still, if those names raise your hackles, it’s probably safest to ignore […]
So in defiance of all good breeding, let me get this part out of the way right now: Lady Bird has been ludicrously over-hyped. Everything it does good – which is a solid amount, to be sure – has been done just as good in earlier films about teenagers feeling like they’re stuck in a […]
The multi-media franchise known under the broad name of Power Rangers in the United States (a substantially revised localisation of the even bigger franchise called Super Sentai in Japan) has been through so many iterations and revisions along the way, why not a franchise-starting action movie remake? Albeit one that seems to have pretty securely […]
“A terrifying disease acting as a mild impediment to a youthful romance” is a firmly established genre, and I’m not sure that I’d ever have been able to explain why, but it’s the world we live in. And insofar as that’s the world we live in, I am grateful for the likes of Everything, Everything, […]
When one gets neck-deep in the muck of persistently godawful cinema – as one must certainly have done as a prerequisite for ever supposing that watching The Amityville Terror, from 2016, is a good idea – little things start to seem really important. Like you need to grab onto something, if this is going to […]
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: Spider-Man: Homecoming provides not only the usual popcorn movie supeheroics, but also a healthy dose of adolescent angst. Genre […]
It’s all right there in the title: Spider-Man: Homecoming. Not “homecoming”, the early-fall tradition in U.S. and Canadian high schools, which puts in only a very mild and plot-inessential cameo in the film. But “homecoming” as in “coming home” as in “welcome to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man, this is where you belong”. I don’t […]
A review requested by Phil Wiese, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I am tempted to say that nobody has ever gotten Empire Records right, but that of course smacks of unbridled arrogance: for why I would I say such a thing, if not because I thought that […]
