Alternate Ending - Movie Review Podcast

Oscar season is here, and it brings with it the promise of real-life stories of famous people, doing the thing that made them famous. There's no end of examples of the biopic that we could have tied it to, but this particular week it's the Winston Churchill-during-wartime tale Darkest Hour that'll do the honors for inspiring our topic. And while national leaders make a good subject for this kind o...

By special request of Patreon donor Travis Neeley, we're happy to share our list of the best parody movies ever made. Whether born of love or pure hateful mockery, the desire to parody individual movies or whole genres has resulted in some of cinema's funniest features, and we share our favorites this episode. In Worth Mentioning, we all chat about The Florida Project , Tim discussed The Breadwinn...

The new adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express concerns - avert your eyes, if you're spoilerphobic - a murder that is committed on the Orient Express, the famed luxury train. If you want to know whodunnit, or why they dunnit, you'll just have to go see the movie - or watch the Oscar-winning 1974 adaptation, or read Agatha Christie's original novel - but we reveal a different kind of secret on...

Thor: Ragnarok has quite a few apparent selling points - its bright colors, Cate Blanchett, a robust New Zealand sense of humor, finally being a Thor film that doesn't suck - but surely we can all agree that one of the things the marketing folks at Marvel hope we're really excited for is the promise of a Thor-on-Hulk fight, one on one. No better time, then, to look over the long history of violent...

Halloween is upon us, and it's got the Alternate Ending crew in a spooky mood. In honor of "All Hallow's Eve", we discuss our favorite movies spent in creepy, rotting, abandoned old houses filled to the brim with ghosts and ghouls and unseen presences, or at least Vincent Price playing puppeteer with a skeleton. In Worth Mentioning, the whole team weighs in on seeing newly released flick The Snowm...

Independence Day producer Dean Devlin made his directorial debut this week with Geostorm , a cautionary story about over-reliance on weather-control satellites and self-driving cars, and other issues that speak so deeply to our current moment. More to the point, it's about floods and ice storms and all other manner of splashy natural disasters, and that's why we're devoting our next episode to the...

With Blade Runner 2049 having opened to great acclaim, but nowhere close to great box office, we could hardly pass up the chance to talk about the present and past of one of cinema's most legendary portraits of the future (not to mention, it's one of Rob's most-anticipated films of the fall ). That's why we're looking at both BR2049 and the legendary, groundbreaking Blade Runner , a film that Tim...

Ask the right people - Rob & Carrie's kids, that is - and they'll tell you that there's not going to be any bigger film this autumn than My Little Pony: The Movie . We're certainly not going to call that kind of insight into question, which is why we celebrated that film's release by taking a look at our favorite movies about horses, and the strong bonds they form with humans. Be they stone-cold c...

With only three months left in the year, we're about to plunge headlong into the twinned moviegoing epochs of Holiday Movie Season and Awards Movie Season, that merry time of year when big-budget tentpole movies about blowing shit up for the whole family and low-budget tragedies about Brits with disabilities rub elbows in the multiplex, vying for your dollars and respect. Before we take that plung...

Let us just say that not all of the members of Alternate Ending are equally pumped up for the release of Kingsman: The Golden Circle , but it makes for a great opportunity to look back over the secret history of spies in the movies. From the glamorous nonsense of the James Bond franchise to the grubby bureaucratic gamesmanship of John le Carré, espionage has been a treasured subject for the movies...

All of us at Alternate Ending finally had a chance to catch up with the films we wanted to see from the recently-ended summer, and before awards season and the holiday rush start up, we take a moment to look back over the popcorn movies that were. How did the whole season stack up? How well did our most-anticipated films stand up? In Worth Mentioning, Tim is FINALLY done catching up with all the A...

From the mediocrity of The Dark Tower just a month ago, we swing back to the strong reviews and deafening buzz of It that just arrived in theaters with some of the biggest hype of any Stephen King feature film adaptation ever. And with 2017 shaping up to be the biggest year for King on big and little screens in memory, what better time for us to select our favorite films based on the blockbuster a...

For this Spoiler Alert episode, we field a request from Patreon donor Travis Neely, who invited us to take a look at the 1946 British fantasy film A Matter of Life and Death (initially released in the United States as Stairway to Heaven ). One of the greatest triumphs of the writing-directing-producing team of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, the film looks at the life and death (and what foll...

Before we bid adieu to the summer of 2017, we spend a podcast celebrating that quintessential summertime activity, camping. Just in time for Rob and Carrie to return from their own camping trip, the Alternate Ending crew select our favorite camping films. From kids at day camp triumphing over the bullies from across the lake to horny teenagers fleeing from machete-wielding maniacs in the woods, if...

Stop me if you've heard this one: a group of colorful figures pool their unique talents to execute a perfect crime, probably involving an elaborately choreographed interchange of people in relation to the world's most advanced security system. This time around, it's Logan Lucky , which of course isn't even the first time that director Steven Soderbergh has visited this genre. That this same man, i...

After three and a half bitterly long years of waiting, The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature is finally here to answer the questions of what happened at the end of The Nut Job . Did they succeed in killing the nut? Will we ever learn the identity of the nut's parents? Is there truly an entire nut civilization? I never actually saw The Nut Job . Anyway, unwanted and unneeded sequels to animated films are...

Earlier this year, the classic sci-fi anime film Ghost in the Shell received a long-gestating, hugely unnecessary live-action remake. But hey, necessary or not, we're fans of stylish sci-fi around these parts, so it seemed like a good excuse to finally catch up with the new film. Better still, we're going to be taking a look at both versions of Ghost in the Shell , the 1995 masterpiece as well as...

So this weekend, the long-awaited The Emoji Movie finally opened and we're... well... so anyway, The Emoji Movie is definitely coming out. There was nothing any of us can do to stop that, but here at Alternate Ending, we're going to make the best of it anyway. We're celebrating movies that make us feel just all kinds of feelings: movies that make you 🤣 then 😥 - movies that make you 🤔 then 😱 -...

War! Huh! Good God, y'all! What is good for? Absolutely nothing, other than serving as the backdrop for some of the best & most famous movies in the history of the medium. And with Christopher Nolan's impending Dunkirk self-consciously bringing back the grand-scale production of the war epics of old, we've decided it's the perfect time to share our picks for the best war movies ever made. In the W...

This past weekend, War for the Planet of the Apes made a trilogy out of one of the most unexpectedly satisfying and successful reboots of recent vintage. To get ourselves warmed up for this third round of nihilistic monkey business, the Alternate Ending crew revisited the first two films that got us to this point: 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes , and 2014's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes ....

Spider-Man: Homecoming arrived in theaters , the third big superhero vehicle of the summer, and the fifth of the year. With all four of them making it onto the list of the year's six highest-grossing films to date (look for Homecoming to effortlessly join them), I think we can safely say that 2017 is shaping up to be just about the most superheroic year ever. So what better time for the Alternate...

The maybe-not-so-long-awaited sequel T2 Trainspotting hits DVD recently and we're letting curiosity get the better of us. On this Spoiler Alert episode, we're going to take a look at both T2 and its 1996 predecessor Trainspotting - and just to make things more interesting, it's going to be Carrie's first time seeing either film. In worth mentioning, Carrie discusses a family favorite with  Big Her...

This week, Transformers: With King Arthur Now, Apparently? Whatever storms its way into theaters, and that's gotten the Alternate Ending crew excited to think about robots. Killer Terminator -style robots; romantic WALL·E -style robots; and all the robots in between. And that's why we're going to be sharing our favorite robots in movie history on our next podcast. From totally inhuman machines, li...

Cars 3 is the 18th feature film released by Pixar Animation Studios, and quite possibly the least-anticipated one yet. That said, we're still going to celebrate, by sharing our picks for the five best films in the studio's 22-year history; a harder task than it seems, given how many of those 18 put in a claim to being among the best animated films of the modern age. In addition, Tim brings Train t...

Universal is making a second Hail Mary throw at establishing a cinematic monster movie universe all in one go, with The Mummy . And this would seem like an obvious bad move, except that somehow, The Mummy has picked up one of the last of the great Movie Stars to headline it, Tom Cruise. Whatever you want to say about the man, there's no doubt that he picks unique projects more than any other actor...