Conventional wisdom holds that the eighth season of the undying television juggernaut The Simpsons was the last that regularly hit the highest peaks that the series was capable of summiting. And while I don’t know that conventional wisdom has necessarily decided which season exactly was the last one where the show was still predominately good, […]
Pirate movies were dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. The pirate movie had died many times since its heyday, from the early-’20s through the mid-’50s. It had a very high-profile death in […]
If nothing else, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 demonstrates with bleak efficiency that the director can only do so much. Francis Lawrence, making his second Hunger Game, still has all the chops he demonstrated with 2013’s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and back further still to the 2007 adaptation of I Am Legend, […]
How does one try to summarise 1999 with one review of one movie? It was arguably (by which I mean “almost certainly, but let’s not be smug know-it-all dicks about it”) the single most transformative year of American filmmaking after the collapse of the New Hollywood Cinema. A stunning number of major filmmakers made some […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the https://www.alternateending.com/2014/09/sin-you-went-away.html blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, we return to the charming world of Basin City, where men […]
For reasons owing mostly to a capricious, unfair universe, A Most Wanted Man will probably always be first remembered as the movie with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last starring role. That’s a cruel fate for any film to have to live up to, but at least in this case it’s helped out by Hoffman being absurdly […]
The dominant aesthetic of commercial American filmmaking in the 1960s was that of unbridled size. Enormous action films with star-studded casts, like The Great Escape; sprawling ensemble comedies like The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming; grandiose historical epics like Doctor Zhivago. And, of course, the musicals. There’s never been anything quite like a […]
When Stanley Kubrick died on 7 March, 1999, it was some twelve years since the release of his last film, Full Metal Jacket; but all was not lost. He’d been working for some time on a new movie, and just days before his passing, he had screened a cut of it to some executives and […]
Considering how much its visceral, rubbery gore effects, electronic score, the niceties of its lighting and film stock, and especially its position in the center of a maelstrom of controversy about these goddamn violence-driven horror pictures with no characterisations beyond “this guy dies then that guy dies” all mark it out as a quintessential product […]
In the annals of films with an influence completely disproportionate to their quality or latter-day popularity, the 1950 adaptation of Treasure Island stands out as a genuinely iconic work of pop art. I can think of no film that has influenced so many people who have never seen it in such a narrow way: it […]
We now hit the point where Stanley Kubrick, Methodical Auteur, turns into Stanley Kubrick, The Hermit Artist. Four years, almost to the day, separated the premieres of 1971’s A Clockwork Orange and 1975’s Barry Lyndon, not quite enough to make it the biggest gap in his career to that point; and given the complexity and […]
I’ll ask you to forgive me for being perverse enough to start a discussion of the most notoriously impersonal and inhumane film of Stanley Kubrick’s career with a personal statement, but I don’t really know what else to do. The thing is, y’see, I love Barry Lyndon – not because it is great, but because […]
