The defining fact about 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is that it isn’t Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. On its own, this fact is hardly distinctive. Many, if not indeed most, movies are not Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The key difference is that Indiana Jones and the Last […]
The Fabelmans is full of striking images. It is, in a sense, a film about striking images. Perhaps the most striking of all, to me, comes somewhat far into the movie – it is maybe even a spoiler to talk about it. But I’m not sure how much you can “spoil” The Fabelmans: the story […]
The new film adaptation of the 1957 stage musical West Side Story has an exceptionally high “why did you feel the need to make this” bar to clear. Because it’s also, in the public imagination if not in the most precisely literal sense, a remake of the 1961 film musical West Side Story, one of […]
Steven Spielberg has indicated during the press tour for Ready Player One that it had, alongside Jaws and Saving Private Ryan, one of the very hardest shoots of any film he’s ever directed. I think this is a slightly odd claim to make publicly – “this shoot was a grueling misery and it took everything […]
A review requested by Gabe, 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! There is, in Shakespeare criticism, an inconsistently-applied and vaguely-defined term, “problem play”, which basically means that nobody knows […]
The miraculous alchemy of The Post lies in how great it can be, despite also being all of the terrible things one might prejudge it for. It is, for starters, one of the most unabashedly Oscarbaity films to come out in a season that has been almost entirely devoid of traditional Oscarbait. And it is […]
A review requested by Caleb Wimble, 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! Having been born in 1981, I am from a very precise generational cohort that is now and […]
Roald Dahl’s 1982 children’s book The BFG is possibly the gentlest thing he ever wrote, with his characteristic dark humor and fantastic violence flickering on the margins but mostly left away from the plot. Even so, director Steven Spielberg and production company Walt Disney Pictures have endeavored to make it gentler still in their new […]
You know who we take for granted? Tom Hanks. And I include myself in this – at the time I write this review, I’m also sorting through my various Best of 2015 year-end musings, and I have not once thought of mentioning him as one of the year’s best actors, despite how utterly arid Best […]
A second review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Once upon a time there was a 24-year-old named Steven Spielberg, who wanted to make movies. Not to grow up into one of the most marketable brand-name producers in the history of the medium; […]
Knowing that I’d eventually get to write about Saving Private Ryan – to grapple with my own wildly inconsistent feelings about it over the years, as well as to challenge all of you, my readers, to do the same – has been one of the things that I’ve been most excited about since the very […]
The question of authorship of 1982’s Poltergeist is not going to be resolved here. It is one of the great stubbornly unanswered question of film production in modern days: whether producer/scenarist/co-writer Steven Spielberg (it is one of only three films for which he took a screenwriting credit) in fact directed the movie for which Tobe […]
