Since its 1985 publication, Don DeLillo’s most celebrated novel, White Noise, has been one of cinema’s white whales. In various superficial respects, the book has always appeared ripe for adaptation—characters are vivid; snappy dialogue abounds; there’s even a literally central catastrophe that unmistakably lends itself to visual pyrotechnics. Yet it’s taken nearly 40 years for […]
There are those filmmakers whose artistic focus is so much on the creation of deeply over-designed worlds and heightened visual style, and so little on anything resembling tight storytelling and naturalistic emotions (I am, to be clear, not saying that this is a bad thing), that learning they are about to make their very first […]
Even for a director with more than 60 years of experience, remaking a canonical classic represents one hell of a daunting challenge. Now, to be both clear and precise, Jerzy Skolimowski’s 18th feature, EO, does not explicitly present itself as a new version of Au hasard Balthazar, directed by the great Robert Bresson and released […]
To be fair to the makers of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, from Marvel Studios capo Kevin Feige to director/co-writer Ryan Coogler and all the way on, they were facing a no-win situation. Chadwick Boseman, the charismatic star of the 2018 Zeitgeist-dominating smash hit Black Panther, died tragically young of cancer at the age of 43 […]
Martin McDonagh’s best strength as a director, it is clear at this point, is that he gets to be in the exclusive business of making films with original screenplays by Martin McDonagh. With The Banshees of Inisherin, the celebrated playwright turned cinematic writer-director is now up to four feature films, and that’s ample evidence to […]
A review requested by Harold, 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! We cannot say of the 2002 miniseries Dinotopia that it has small ambitions. Packed into its three parts, […]
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead specialize in making movies that squander a fantastic—in both senses of that adjective—sci-fi premise. They don’t actually set out to squander anything, I’m quite confident, and certainly there are many rabid Benson & Moorhead fans who’ll disagree (and perhaps even some who don’t mentally mistake “Benson & Moorhead” for a […]
Erich Maria Remarque’s undying 1928 anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front has the uncommon fortune for a major literary classic to have been adapted into a major cinematic classic, and this happened almost immediately: the U.S.-produced adaptation that would go on to win the Academy Award for Outstanding Production (i.e., Best Picture) at […]
Let’s start with the casting, since it’s the flashiest thing about Sam & Kate by twenty miles or so. This multigenerational romance stars two pairs of parent-child actors, the first Dustin Hoffman and son Jake Hoffman, the second Sissy Spacek and her daughter Schuyler Fisk. A cast like this raises the question: Do the young, […]
The Netflix Christmas season is back, and as much as I would like to rejoice, 2022 is an astonishingly anemic year for the streaming service. In the past we have been treated with various entries in the Princess Switch and A Christmas Prince franchises along with variably high-concept one-offs like The Knight Before Christmas and A Castle […]
I don’t think it’s a good habit to get into to take account of the advertising campaign materials – part of what we call “paratexts” in the thinking-too-hard business – as part of a film review, but in the special case of Armageddon Time, I will make an exception. The film’s poster, which you can […]
The route that Weird: The Al Yankovic Story took to the screen is, well, weird. The feature is based on a short film that was originally released on the comedy website Funny or Die back in 2010, which presented a faux trailer for a Walk the Line style movie about Weird Al, as played by Breaking Bad‘s […]
