In a long career as Hollywood royalty that has generally swung between the none-too-distant poles of “affably, watchably mediocre” and “tediously mediocre”, Ron Howard’s best film as a director has long been 1995’s Apollo 13, and I would be inclined to say that it’s not really a close race. I’m not quite going to say […]
In the three-and-a-half decades since the release of the exquisitely focused and gnarly Predator, a high point in the careers of both director John McTiernan and star Arnold Schwarzenegger, that film’s sequels and spin-offs have all been built around complicated, cumbersome variations on the misguided quest, “you wanted more world-building, right? Just tons and tons […]
If you work in media, you likely know someone like B.J. Novak’s Ben Manalowitz — someone hell-bent on finding a big idea that will propel them to fame and fortune, with or without any actual profundity. Novak has played this semi-punchable character more than once, and in Vengeance, his feature film directorial debut, leans hard […]
The 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens was a massive bestseller, whose 15 million copies sold make it by far one of the biggest literary successes of the 2010s and among the 100-odd bestselling novels of the last hundred years.* It’s also a book I hadn’t heard of prior to the spring […]
I would claim, and I would certainly appear to be in a very small minority in doing so, that with Nope, Jordan Peele has officially entered the realm of wildly talented directors whose work is all but guaranteed to be interesting and visually striking on a rare and potent level, but who are also fucking […]
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: Where the Crawdads Sing tells the story of a young woman who lives and thrives in a swampland, away […]
Serial killer movies and TV shows are common as dirt, and most of the serial killers within them feel a bit commonplace as well: you’ve got your brutish animal menace, you’ve got your erudite reptilian wits, you’ve got your soft-spoken weirdo with an unnerving stare. There aren’t all that many movie serial killers who actually […]
Jurassic World Dominion fucks up absolutely everything it’s possible to fuck up. It even fucks up how to put a colon in its own title. To my knowledge, the oldest film to have staged a scene of a dinosaur attacking a human is Willis O’Brien’s partially-lost The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, from 1918. So by […]
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: we are far enough into the present wave of Stephen King adaptations that we’ve hit the “all the famous […]
A review requested by Kevin, 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! In later years, Film Twitter has (in its Film Twitter way) decided that M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 feature […]
A review requested by Brennan, 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! To begin with the low-hanging fruit, I would like to suggest that there should be absolutely no doubt […]
Kimi is by no plausible yardstick a stretch for director Steven Soderbergh: the most excessively generous thing I could imagine saying about it is that, for a film which unambiguously and indeed proudly steals elements from Rear Window, The Conversation, and Blow Out, it does so very artfully, and with a good understanding of what […]
