It’s impressive, in its way: 2022 managed to produce a worse wide-release film than the whole of 2021 on literally its very first try. The 355, the first movie of the new year, makes virtually no right choices, and arguably started that habit before pre-production, before development even, when 355 star/producer Jessica Chastain and director […]
There’s a strong possibility that A Hero is the most that Asghar Farhadi has ever “done an Asghar Farhadi”. This would typically be a problem, but since “doing an Asghar Farhadi” basically means to craft a blend of social commentary and white-knuckle moral thriller done in a deceptively loose realist aesthetic, telling a story that […]
“These two unrelated movies constitute a trend” is not by any stretch of the imagine my favorite bad habit in film criticism. Yet it seems awfully hard not to notice that December 2021 has borne witness to two different movies made by A-list Oscar-winning directors that are both technically new adaptations of non-movie media, but […]
Since the moment that the first Resident Evil film appeared way back in 2002, that movie and its five sequels have come under attack from fans of the video game series, on the charges of reckless infidelity to the source material. To be entirely fair, they also have come under attack from critics and audiences […]
I would be tempted to say that Last Night in Soho is the film with which director Edgar Wright proves that he needs somebody else to write his screenplays, but then, didn’t we kind of already know that? Specifically, that he needs Simon Pegg to write his screenplays, or co-write them, anyway: the three Wright-Pegg […]
A guide to all things Bond at Alternate Ending. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga Written by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Cary Joji Fukunaga and Phoebe Waller-Bridge Premiered 28 September, 2021 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE I have to give it credit for being a basically perfect summary of the entire movie: it’s much too long, it […]
A paradox about Titane, and not the only one, is that it almost certainly didn’t deserve to win the 2021 Palme d’Or, and also it’s extremely cool and exciting that it did so. The Palme is probably the major film award with the best batting average, quality-wise, so I don’t mean to impugn it in […]
Clint Eastwood, all 91 years of him, has been at the “what if this is his very last film?” stage of his directorial career at least since 2008’s Gran Torino, ten whole movies ago. That was also the first of his “well, even if he keeps directing, you can definitely tell that he’s retiring from […]
A review requested by Travis, 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! Two decades into the 21st Century, the phrase “a Sam Raimi superhero movie” surely takes us straight to […]
The Card Counter doesn’t seem like it should be as tough a nut to crack as it is. It’s the story of a man, William Tillich (Oscar Isaac), who was involved in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in the 2000s, served time in prison for his actions, and now wanders like a ghost […]
In a bleak age for big studio moviemaking, when not all that many directors seem to really love their job, and even fewer seem to love the medium, we are blessed to have someone like James Wan. The man palpably, overwhelmingly, desperately loves movies, and at their best, his projects are so overripe and juicy […]
With Don’t Breathe 2, it becomes officially impossible not to conclude that co-writers Fede Álvarez & Rodo Sayagues just don’t know how audience identification and sympathy work. Their 2016 thriller Don’t Breathe (directed by Álvarez) was broadly liked, but certainly not by me: I found it to have wantonly miscalculated in assuming we’d effortlessly side […]
