There’s no real reason that a film adapted from the 2016 stage musical The Prom needs to be as extraordinarily bad as the one that we have now been given by the professional mediocrity vendors at Netflix and gay terrorist Ryan Murphy. I have not seen it nor heard a scrap of the cast recording […]
Brink of Life is an overlooked film in Ingmar Bergman’s career, possibly because he later stepped away from it, but it feels to me like a crucial example of his developing career at the end of the 1950s. On top of being, in its own right, a terrific acting showcase, which by this point was […]
A review requested by Mandy, 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! Before watching it, I knew about 2013’s Fateful Findings, the breakthrough for writer/director/producer* Neil Breen, only that it […]
The argument is there to be made that the present moment in American history is so inherently ludicrous that it is immune to satire. I would not want to be the one to make it, but I offer to whomever wants to take the job a peerless piece of evidence in the form of Irresistible. […]
Spike Lee is a director uniquely disinclined to repeat himself, and he’s not really repeating himself with Da 5 Bloods, his first feature-length film made by and for Netflix (which is by no means the way I’d prefer to see it). But he is re-running an experiment. The film is a whole lot of things […]
Ingmar Bergman is among the filmmakers most associated with the idea that the director is a powerful individual voice who is solely associated with the meaning and shape of the finished film, but like anybody else working in the medium, he had collaborators. And those collaborators had a significant impact on the nature of the […]
As we all know, On the Waterfront exists because film and theater legend Elia Kazan, when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in April 1952, complied by naming the names of eight people who had, at one point in the 1930s, been card-carrying Communists. This cost him many of his friends, and he wanted […]
I guess it’s not really “surprising” that there weren’t really any knock-offs of James Cameron’s 1997 box-office behemoth Titanic to speak of; pragmatically, what could you do? There’s kind of only the one story to tell, and nobody was going to have the budget to tell it better. So outside of a flood of non-fiction […]
Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of the bibles of the 1960s counterculture in the U.S., a link between the Beats of the late ’50s and the hippies of the late ’60s and their shared belief in the fundamental rottenness of the The System. That it would be made […]
I have a my disagreements with legendary film critic Pauline Kael, some of them fairly intense, but one thing I’ll never fault her for: she could write a hell of a sentence. And there’s no sentence of hers I co-sign more eagerly than the one that she used to start her review of Rain Man, […]
The learning curve for early sound cinema was steep and fast. In the immediate wake of the enormously popular sync-sound scenes from 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the American film indsutry jumped with great enthusiasm and no planning into making some of the most awkward, unwatchable films of its entire history across the course of 1928, […]
