West Side Story, the highest-grossing film of 1961 and the winner of that year’s Best Picture Oscar (one of a whopping ten awards it one at that ceremony; only three films have ever won more*), has been a duly-anointed classic for so long – pretty much since 1961, really – that it can be hard […]
There’s no reason other than arbitrary numerology to compare the 2010 animated feature Tangled with the 2021 animated feature Encanto: the first is Official Disney Animated Feature #50 (a number arrived at with some corporate fudging, since it includes 2000’s Dinosaur, which really shouldn’t count; on the other hand, 1943’s Victory Through Air Power really […]
The original Brodaway production of the musical Dear Evan Hansen won six Tonys off of nine nominations, making it the single most-awarded production of the 2016-’17 season. In some years this would mean very little, but that season was an atypically competitive one for critically-acclaimed new musicals, meaning that there had to be some actual […]
I don’t know that the mission of Alternate Ending necessarily counts talking about the video recordings of stage productions; personally, I don’t “count” them as movies, and while I suppose in a pinch you could call them a type of documentary, that feels like a cheat. But one does not wish to encounter something so […]
TIM: Welcome all to a very special Alternate Ending review. Our subject for today is the latest adaptation of the fairy tale Cinderella, this one prepared by Sony for a planned theatrical release that got squashed like so many others by the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, it has entered the world as an Amazon Studios original, […]
Love it or hate it – and I stand before you as proof positive that one can do both of those things simultaneously – it must at least be declared that Annette is a fearless work of capital-A Art, the kind of increasingly rare motion picture that demands to be wrestled with and worked over […]
This does not strike me as an unreasonable set of expectations: give me a movie musical with lots of wide shots to show off the dancing, long takes to serve the same end, tuneful songs to drive the dancing forward, and good color saturation to make it all pop off the screen, and I’m happy. […]
There’s no reason for Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga to be good, and since in fact it isn’t good, that works out. But oh, how tantalisingly close to “good” it comes! The latest entry in the moribund “Will Ferrell does a profession poorly but arrogantly, perhaps while adopting a goofy accent” genre […]
Pablo Larraín, probably the most prominent Chilean director in the world right now, has at this point directed eight feature films. Most of these are period films; most of these are explicitly about politics; most of them have a certain performative sense of irony. His eighth and newest film, Ema falls into not one of […]
For such a tiny sliver of a thing – 70 minutes long, set almost entirely in one location, almost nothing “happens” – Lovers Rock feels like it’s almost boundless in how much it can yield up to its viewer. This is true simply at the level of how we encounter it: taken purely on its […]
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 […]
Being the best film adaptation of an opera doesn’t take all that much. Stage-to-screen adaptations are, in general, tough to get more than passably well, and opera has the additional challenge of being exceptionally “stagey” and beholden to the peculiarities of live theater. Listening to a character spend five minutes singing to establish one plot […]
