Video game adaptations are, one sometimes suspects, inherently doomed. Either the source material doesn’t have any story and so one has to be welded on crudely, or it has enough story to cover a 20-hour experience that has to be basically started from scratch to fit feature length, and in either case, the story is […]
Since the moment that the first Resident Evil film appeared way back in 2002, that movie and its five sequels have come under attack from fans of the video game series, on the charges of reckless infidelity to the source material. To be entirely fair, they also have come under attack from critics and audiences […]
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 […]
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 […]
The 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune offers one of the most interesting of all wrinkles to auteur theory, as it is generally understood. The film was the third feature directed by David Lynch, and the last before he became “David Lynch” as we now understand that phrase with 1986’s Blue […]
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 […]
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, […]
It’s missing the point, I know, but the question I feel compelled to start with is: did we need a revisionist version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? The 14th Century Middle English poem is a timeless favorite of medieval literature buffs, but how many of us can there possibly be? Certainly not enough […]
Intermittently throughout the 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 a major new release. This week: David Lowery and A24 have brought us a moody art-film version of most beloved of 14th Century romances in the form […]
Intermittently throughout the 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 a major new release. This week: David Lowery and A24 have brought us a moody art-film version of most beloved of 14th Century romances in the form […]
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. […]
I’m no purist. I don’t think there are all that many things you need to include in a film adaption of the long-running video game series Mortal Kombat. While the games have a fairly involved overarching story line, I don’t really think most players are that aware of what it is, and anyway it’s been […]
