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 […]
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 […]
I’m not exactly sure how it is that directing a critically-acclaimed Oscar-nominated film that helped create an animation studio and remains the highest-grossing film in that studio’s history sends a fella to Director Jail, but that’s where Henry Selick has been for the thirteen years since making Coraline, still one of the best animated features […]
Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is not a good film, which comes as absolutely no surprise whatsoever. It is surprising, perhaps, that it isn’t much worse – and “much worse” is, to be fair, in the eye of the beholder. Nothing could be more understandable than somebody subjecting themselves to this film and declaring it an unmitigated […]
The 1940 feature-length animated adaptation of Pinocchio is one of the crown jewels of American cinema. It is perhaps the most lustrous, richly-colored and -textured of all hand-drawn and hand-painted animated films, as much an example of fine art given the illusion of life through 24 frames-per-second movement as it is just another cartoon – […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: Baz Luhrmann directs his first feature in nine years, Elvis. Elvis being Elvis, this isn’t even the first film […]
The grand-scale spectacular biopic Elvis (the fourth narrative treatment of the life of Elvis Presley in any filmed medium to go by that precise title, and at 159 minutes, somehow, also the shortest*) is the first feature directed by Baz Luhrmann in the nine years since The Great Gatsby. It’s been considerably longer since his […]
A review requested by Devin, 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’s sophisticated enough for children, simple enough for adults!” reads the tagline on the poster for the 1970 […]
A review requested by Gavin, 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! Tommy, the 1975 feature film adaptation of the 1969 concept album by The Who, is an erratic, garish […]
There’s no reason that Sing 2 had to be better than 2016’s Sing. Illumination has gotten a lot of mileage out of putting absolutely no effort whatsoever into their movies, and their sequels have generally been the worst of a sorry lot. Not that I assume that the development meeting for Sing 2 started out […]
Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac feels like it would be a perfect candidate for being turned into a musical, and indeed it would appear that exactly that transformation has happened, multiple times, in both French and English. So arguably there’s actually nothing special about the new film Cyrano, except that it is, as […]
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 […]
