The 1966 television special How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is a masterpiece at least three times over. First, it’s one of the greatest of all Christmas stories told in an audio-visual medium, filling its 26 minutes with exactly the correct amount of warm and fuzzy sentiment, wry cynicism to keep said sentiment in check, and […]
It’s not really accurate to suggest that The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is the latest example of Disney’s irritatingly robust program of remaking its animated features in shrieking, shiny CGI and “live-action”. But it’s not really inaccurate, either: the feature makes more than its share of glancing nods back towards 1940’s Fantasia, mostly (though […]
Once upon a time, there was a famous person, who made a famous piece of art, but get this: the famous piece of art was inspired by the events he experienced in his life. In other words, my friends, we have here yet another “Shakespeare in Love about _____” movie, with the blank this particular […]
“These films have a peculiar and at times indefinable whiff of the ersatz”, I once said about films made for conservative, fundamentalist Christian audiences on mainstream models, and while I was right, I got lucky. You don’t know from ersatz until you’ve seen The Star, which is on the one hand a studio-funded “faith audience” […]
A review requested by Tristan Frayling, with thanks for 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! Like many a film, Go feels like it could only possibly have ever been made in the […]
The fact that Elle isn’t punishingly unpleasant is maybe the most unpleasant thing about it. One longs for the film to tip fully over into brutal viciousness, so we could be sure that it’s got the proper outrage about its sordid subject matter; or for it to go all-in on sleazy exploitation, so we could […]
A review requested by Steve T, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There are, in the broadest possible sense, two epochs of the English-language romantic comedy. One was the age of the great screwball comedies, which ended during World War II. The second was the era of of […]
There’s almost nothing that the 2003 sci-fi horror film Dreamcatcher has in common with the 2016 Oscarbait melodrama Collateral Beauty, and yet they’re the only movies I can ever remember having seen that are both bad in almost exactly the same way. To wit, we have here a movie that has been made by very […]
The Conjuring 2 is a proper old-school sequel. It doesn’t retroactively turn The Conjuring into the first movement of a long-form narrative; it doesn’t really mention the events of The Conjuring at all, outside of a couple quick visual allusions. It just takes the same heroes, married paranormal investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren […]
A review requested by Geoffrey Moses, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I have mentioned before, and I shall mention in the future, that one of my most vulnerable weaknesses as a moviegoer is for anything that foregrounds hyper-literate insulting dialogue delivered with sufficient vigor and acidity by […]
Director Michael Dougherty’s first film, Trick ‘r Treat, is both a great Halloween movie and a great horror film, which sounds like a trivially easy task to accomplish. If any holiday is well-suited to a genre, it’s Halloween and horror; and yet what else has ever done it? Even the mighty Halloween isn’t quite as […]
Carol‘s opening shot is, while probably not the “best” of 2015, is at any rate one that lays out the tenor of the film to come to best effect. There’s a curlicue pattern in metal, almost Art Deco, if not for the dull color, and the camera lingers on it to allow us to appreciate […]
