The very fine backstage melodrama What Price Hollywood? was released in 1932, and for all but the first five years of its life, it has been best known as being the unofficial-but-very-obvious basis for a different movie and its subsequent remakes. This is a goddamned shame, though it’s not terribly difficult to see what happened. […]
Without a moment’s hesitation, I’d declare 2009’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself the peak of Tyler Perry’s career as a director, and in a pinch I’d call 2008’s The Family That Preys his second-best, and this matters because of one of the only characteristics they share in common: prior to 2018, they were […]
Breaking In is definitely not good, but I definitely enjoyed it a lot anyway. Take that for exactly as much as you will, and pay exactly as much attention to the star rating as you think you must, but be aware that the summer of 2018 will be thick with “better” films that I’ll be […]
A review requested by Brennan Klein, 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! By the start of 1988, Pedro Almodóvar had already made six features, including at least one candidate […]
Red Sparrow is real dumb. We can and shall go into why that is the case, but it seemed important to get that read into the record as soon as possible. I cannot say how much of that dumbness was intrinsic to the 2013 source novel by Jason Matthews, and how much was introduced by […]
I cannot in honesty say that Forever My Girl is a bad movie that’s only one tweak in the script away from being good. The filmmaking itself is too defective for that. Especially the camerawork, which is full of irritating little shimmies that oughtn’t be there; most egregiously, during a major emotional beat near the […]
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: Pixar has, for reasons best not examined too closely, returned to the world of talking race cars with Cars […]
Season 1 Pilot (8 April, 1990) A+ Episode 1 (12 April, 1990) A Episode 2 (19 April, 1990) A+ Episode 3 (26 April, 1990) A- Episode 4 (3 May, 1990) B+ Episode 5 (10 May, 1990) A Episode 6 (17 May, 1990) A- Episode 7 (23 May, 1990) A Season 2 Episode 8 (30 September, […]
A review requested by Salim “STinG” Garami, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I’ll freely admit that I can’t tell if Class of 1984 is a good movie or not. On the one hand, it’s unmixed, trashy exploitation, portraying a most overheated melodrama that plays on the audience’s […]
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 […]
A review requested by Mark Falconer, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. My sense is that the 1954 version of A Star Is Born is thought of first and above all, and maybe to the exclusion of all else, as a Judy Garland vehicle. That’s fair, because Garland’s […]
A review requested by Kaitlyn B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There are two great cinema masterpieces of American folklore.* Kind of. One of them is The Devil and Daniel Webster AKA All That Money Can Buy, which is based on a 1936 short story that draws […]
