Never tried to hide the fact that film noir is probably my favorite genre, ever. Three reasons: the first is its unrelenting nihilism; the second is the quality of visual narrative (and just how damn beautiful a good noir looks); the third is the wit of the characters and dialogue. Okay, “wit” maybe overselling it, “soul-dead sarcasm” is a bit better. But a good noir isn’t just villainous dames and […]
Some films that are marketed with an emphasis on how much of a “passion project” they were for the people involved are obviously bullshitting us. This is not the case with Black Adam. That this film, the first big-screen adventure for the mid-tier DC Comics supervillain-cum-antihero, is a long-gestating passion project for star Dwayne Johnson is the unvarnished truth, and we know this because there have been stories floating around […]
Hi everybody. How are you doing? It’s been a bit. It has, in fact, I think been the single longest drought of film reviews from me since I started writing back in 2005, and I didn’t want that to go unexplained. Not that I haven’t been writing – oh, the writing I’ve done! I have been in strict mental isolation working on my dissertation, to meet a deadline that I […]
At the request of Patreon subscriber Brian Fowler, and just in time for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson about to star in the Netflix action-comedy Red Notice, the Alternate Ending crew is going to tag team on an episode all about the colorful history of wrestlers who’ve wandered into the movie. Some have just showed up for a random movie or two, Roddy Piper; some have transformed into proper leading men […]
Whatever one things of the seven films to date that make up the Conjuring Universe – I admire their guileless commitment to the “jump out and say boo!” qualities of a good cheesy ghost story, and the thick mountains of period atmosphere they wrap that commitment in – surely we must all agree that the crown jewels of the franchise are The Conjuring of 2013 and The Conjuring 2 of […]
2020 was an astonishingly terrible, stressful year for reasons far more serious and consequential than what happened to cinema. But this isn’t a public policy website, and even if far, far more globally important things went on in the world, it’s still pretty important to me as an individual what happened to the medium around which I have built my entire professional identity, and surely too much of my personal […]
And now the first of two posts bidding farewell to the beastliest year of cinema I’ve ever experienced in my days as a reviewer. There was damn little that was great in 2020, and not all that much that was even very good, but scrounge hard enough and there are some real diamonds in amongst all the broken glass. (NB: I am following calendar year eligibility, not the Academy’s extended […]
The Hudsucker Proxy is damn weird. Weird in and of itself, weird that it came into existence, weird for its place in the career of Joel & Ethan Coen. The origins of the film go all the way back to 1981, when Joel had just met Sam Raimi while working as an assistant editor on the latter man’s feature directorial debut, The Evil Dead, and the Coens and Raimi quickly […]
For the posts expanding on these choices: #1-10 #11-20 #21-30 #31-40 #41-50 #51-60 #61-70 #71-80 #81-90 #91-100 The worst films of the decade See also: The Best Films of the 2010s (podcast episode) 1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011) 2. World of Tomorrow (Don Hertzfeldt, 2015) –World of Tomorrow, Episode 2: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts (Don Hertzfeldt, 2017) 3. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010) 4. The […]
The complete list #1-10 #11-20 #21-30 #31-40 #41-50 #51-60 #61-70 #71-80 #81-90 #91-100 See also: The Best Films of the 2010s (podcast episode) 20. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014, USA / Germany) A tonal balancing act so delicate that I can’t tell you if it’s a movie of pure formalist joy with a melancholy grace note to offset the sweetness, or if it’s a deeply sorrowful film obsessed […]
And so this cumbersome, erratic movie year comes to a close. 2019 has had its share of unassailable masterworks, but it’s also had more than its share of soul-crushing mediocrity. And the last month looks to have more of both, though in the case of one particular motion picture with digital fur technology, my expectations are definitely not for something as pedestrian as mediocrity. 6.12.2019 A quintessential first weekend in […]
Intermittently 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 Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, Dwayne Johnson plays a character who was introduced as a villain in a franchise film before becoming a hero in this standalone adventure only glancingly connected to […]
