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 […]
Bones and All, the seventh feature film directed by Luca Guadagnino, is kind of about cannibalism, and this is where it gets itself into trouble. No film should be “kind of” about cannibalism. Some subjects just don’t allow for half measures. You should never walk out of a film whose protagonists are cannibals – bisexual […]
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, […]
Park Chan-wook received the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and though I’ve only seen, at this writing, five of the 21 features that screened in Competition, it’s hard to imagine that Vincent Lindon’s jury (which included Asghar Farhadi, Rebecca Hall, Joachim Trier, and Jeff Nichols, among others) didn’t make the correct […]
If all you know about heavy metal icon Rob Zombie is his directorial filmography, you would still have absolutely no doubt that here is a man who adores horror cinema. His first seven theatrical features all have the unmistakable energy of somebody who has seen all the movies and knows them inside and out, and […]
A review requested by Carl, 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! It is highly likely that 1999’s The Story of Us would inevitably bring to mind the once-in-a-generation classic […]
For those of you just joining us, the story of the After franchise is a long and winding road, getting longer and windier by the minute. This project started its life as an AU (alternate universe) fan fiction by Anna Todd asking the penetrating question of “What if Harry Styles was a sexy, dangerous college student who […]
A review requested by Brian, 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! The costume drama is a genre as old as the movies themselves (The Execution of Mary, Queen of […]
George Miller’s directorial career, which only now arrives at Feature Film #10, 43 years after his debut, consists basically of only weird movies and very weird movies, which should make me pause before saying that Three Thousand Years of Longing is the weirdest, and yet here we are. This is, effectively, his “one for me” […]
In a world of endless sequels and remakes, it’s easy to lose sight of a less common but more valuable phenomenon—what one might call the spiritual successor. These are films that take their inspiration from, and hence owe their very existence to, a single ancestor, but are not pointless carbon copies; characters get substantially reimagined, […]
The 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens was a massive bestseller, whose 15 million copies sold make it by far one of the biggest literary successes of the 2010s and among the 100-odd bestselling novels of the last hundred years.* It’s also a book I hadn’t heard of prior to the spring […]
A note about the critic. While I am a devoted Austen-ite, her final, posthumously published novel Persuasion is not one of her works that particularly captures my imagination, good as it may be. Thus, I am somewhat inoculated against people fucking with it, which probably explains why I’m not illegally downloading a copy of Netflix’s […]
