Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead specialize in making movies that squander a fantastic—in both senses of that adjective—sci-fi premise. They don’t actually set out to squander anything, I’m quite confident, and certainly there are many rabid Benson & Moorhead fans who’ll disagree (and perhaps even some who don’t mentally mistake “Benson & Moorhead” for a […]
In the three-and-a-half decades since the release of the exquisitely focused and gnarly Predator, a high point in the careers of both director John McTiernan and star Arnold Schwarzenegger, that film’s sequels and spin-offs have all been built around complicated, cumbersome variations on the misguided quest, “you wanted more world-building, right? Just tons and tons […]
I would claim, and I would certainly appear to be in a very small minority in doing so, that with Nope, Jordan Peele has officially entered the realm of wildly talented directors whose work is all but guaranteed to be interesting and visually striking on a rare and potent level, but who are also fucking […]
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: infamously, Lightyear is a film based on a different film that never existed but inspired a toy that was […]
Lightyear, the 26th feature film produced by Pixar Animation studios and easily the worst one that has no talking cars in it, opens with two title cards relaying the following information: “In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. It was from his favorite movie. This is that movie.” […]
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: Jurassic World Dominion continues its franchise’s burning question of what happens in a version of the modern world where […]
Jurassic World Dominion fucks up absolutely everything it’s possible to fuck up. It even fucks up how to put a colon in its own title. To my knowledge, the oldest film to have staged a scene of a dinosaur attacking a human is Willis O’Brien’s partially-lost The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, from 1918. So by […]
Crimes of the Future, the second film of that title directed by David Cronenberg, is two contradictory things at one and the same time. On the one hand, it’s the director’s return to fleshy grotesques, more than two decades after he abandoned his characteristic mode of body horror (a term he does not use) for […]
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. Last week: David Cronenberg, in his years as an elder statesman of cinema, has taken the new Crimes of the Future […]
Other than the pilot episode, all reviews of The X-Files are exclusive for Patreon subscribers. Click here to support Alternate Ending through Patreon. Season 1 (1993-1994) Pilot (10 September, 1993) B Deep Throat (17 September, 1993) B+ Squeeze (24 September, 1993) A- Conduit (1 October, 1993) A- The Jersey Devil (8 October, 1993) C Shadows […]
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: we are far enough into the present wave of Stephen King adaptations that we’ve hit the “all the famous […]
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. Last week (and also this week, and very likely next week also): that redoubtable old speculative fiction mainstay, the multiverse, has […]
