If you have set yourself the task of making a movie prequel to probably Roald Dahl’s best-known children’s book, 1964’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and what you are actually doing is making a prequel to the 1971 film based on that book, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but six of one, half-dozen of […]
The phrase “generous to a fault” irresistibly suggests itself in connection with the feature film Barbie, a combination of toy commercial, exercise in feminist critical theory, anti-capitalist satire, and celebration of the ennobling power of consumerism directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, who certainly deserves some credit for having been assigned an almost impossible unfair […]
A review requested by Avshalom, 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! What a bizarre coincidence befell Paramount Pictures and Hollywood at large in 1990: two of the five Best […]
It’s odd to say of Insidious: The Red Door, no less than the fifth film in a series, “that sure seems like an unnecessary sequel”, but the Insidious series has followed a crooked path. First there was Insidious, which premiered in 2010 but for all intents and purposes is a 2011 film, and it was […]
If anything makes me happy about the existence of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a bloated and dour attempt at nostalgia-scraping that primarily demonstrates that there really probably wasn’t any artistically valid reason to give the swashbuckling archaeologist his third consecutive “grand farewell tour” in a series that only runs to five films, […]
We are living in a golden age of movies for children that present metaphorical parables about racism, in which the metaphor is horrendously bad and probably makes the pro-racism argument more effectively than the anti-racism argument. Not a good thing to have a golden age of. But anyway, here were are with the 27th feature […]
As of its auspicously-numbered 13th feature, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, two of the three best features ever made by Illumination are its two most recent films (Minions: The Rise of Gru was the last one), so maybe we stand at the dawn of a new run of quality projects from that studio, during which […]
It’s not, like, at all hard to identify the core strengths of 2019’s Shazam!: a slightly ramshackle, Amblin-in-the-’80s approach to family-friendly fantasy, and the odd bidirectional chemistry between Jack Dylan Grazer as nerdy teen Freddy Freeman, and Asher Angel and Zachary Levi tag-teaming as, respectively, the scrawny teen and massive superhero versions of Billy Batson, […]
The low-hanging fruit first: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is complete garbage as an Ant-Man movie. 2015’s Ant-Man and 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp are two of the most perfectly-matched films in the vast corpus of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, now arriving at its 31st feature film, providing almost identical experiences, and in their offbeat […]
Diversity. It makes us great. It makes us strong. Quality representation of our many diverse cultures in our many diverse films is so important. And that’s why it’s so wonderful that, thanks to Netflix and a plucky creative team, the broader Latin American community finally has Christmas with You, a sickly-sweet, forgettably mediocre Christmas movie […]
The Parker Family Saga is the franchise you didn’t know existed. You are probably familiar—likely over-familiar—with the crown jewel, Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story (1983), cementing his reputation as a purveyor of perennial Christmas classics. If you are a little more film-savvy (and you are on this website), you might be aware of the multiple […]
There’s plenty of room to do a serious overhaul on the narrative formula of A Christmas Carol, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. As what surely must be the work of English-language fiction to have been adapted into the greatest number of different films, plays, television episodes, and I imagine other […]