It is genuinely difficult to understand how Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald could have turned out so badly. This is, after all, the tenth movie in what I guess is officially being called the Wizarding World franchise, after eight Harry Potters and 2016’s Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and one of the hallmarks of the series across its first fifteen years of existence was an […]
If you have been awake at any point over the last year, it has surely come to your attention that there is a new movie from the Harry Potter universe on the horizon. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, aside from having an M.C. Escher-esque labyrinth of a name, also features Jude Law playing a young version of Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore. This is a character who author J.K. Rowling […]
Fantastic Beasts: The Grimes of Grindelwald takes us back to the Harry Potter universe, which love it or hate it, surely we must all agree it’s one of the most comprehensively designed movie universes that has ever existed. And in celebration of the amazing feat of production design that this franchise has represented, we’re taking a look at our very favorite movie universes: the places so beautiful, so comfortable, so […]
November tends to be a bloated month for movies – family releases, Oscar hopefuls, and the beginning of Blockbuster Season 2.0 all jockeying for space – but this year seems especially so, and with a really peculiar mix of movies, too. I don’t even know how to make a meta-narrative out of this, so let’s just jump straight into it. 2.11.2018 Speaking of bloat, the first weekend of the month […]
It seems to me that to make good, effective children’s horror must have one of the highest degrees of difficulty out there. You have to thread the tiniest of needles to find something that’s sufficiently terrifying and otherworldly on the one hand that it’s actually scary, the kind that worms its way into your bones; on the other hand, you have to make sure that it’s safe and domesticated enough, […]
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: in addition to being the best DC superhero team movie ever released to theaters, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is the first time in ages that a comic book movie has remembered that […]
A very warm welcome from all of us at Alternate Ending to our new contributor, Catherine Clark! From Romy and Michelle to Doc and Marty and Jay and Silent Bob to Han and Chewie, the best movie duos and sidekicks are always up for debate. But I’m tired of just shipping human characters as iconic duos. (Not that I’ll ever tire of writing that Spider-Man and Shuri fanfic inspired by, […]
It is easy, and usually ignorant as hell, for the Western critic to declare of any fantasy-tinged anime feature from Japan, “why, that reminds me of Studio Ghibli!”, but in the case of Mary and the Witch’s Flower, that resemblance is less a matter of cultural bias than of distinct, definite intent. This is, in a very real way, Studio Ponoc’s attempt to step into the gulf created in the […]
Honestly, it gives me genuine hope that something as fucking awful as Bright can still get made. This is a movie that people believed in. Especially screenwriter Max Landis: you can tell just from how proudly the script presents all of its baffling, confused world-building and social satire, like a three-year-old coated head to toe in fingerpaint and raising up a sheet of paper scrawled with incoherent brown swirls, all […]
I would ask you, if you please, to consider the 1991 Beauty and the Beast, the crown jewel of the Disney Renaissance. What, pray tell, do you find to be wrong with it? Or let me rather put it this way: is there even one single image in that whole movie that generates the response from you, “I would like this more if it were in rendered in a combination […]
And here we are, with the Oscars are coming this very weekend. Gawk in wonder as three very different people all agree that La La Land will win absolutely no fewer than 8 awards, though we are bitterly divided on just how it will subdivide the sound categories. BEST PICTURE Arrival Fences Hacksaw Ridge Hell or High Water Hidden Figures La La Land Lion Manchester by the Sea Moonlight Tim […]
We have, in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a first for the Harry Potter Cinematic Universe: a film with a running time of about two-and-a-quarter hours, telling a story that was designed to take about two-and-a-quarter hours to tell. This was a problem for just about every one of the eight Potter films made between 2001 and 2011, sometimes to profoundly distressing effect. I have not forgotten the […]
