The phrase “generous to a fault” irresistibly suggests itself in connection with the feature film Barbie, a combination of toy commercial, exercise in feminist critical theory, anti-capitalist satire, and celebration of the ennobling power of consumerism directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, who certainly deserves some credit for having been assigned an almost impossible unfair […]
There’s a very strong argument to be made that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the best feature film yet made featuring the titular comic book superheroes, TV cartoon stars, and best-selling toys. This isn’t such a big deal as all that, given that there’s also an argument to be made that Teenage Mutant […]
A review requested by Avshalom, 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! What a bizarre coincidence befell Paramount Pictures and Hollywood at large in 1990: two of the five Best […]
I wouldn’t precisely say that Oppenheimer is a Christopher Nolan movie for people who don’t like Christopher Nolan movies. I have people in my life who don’t like Christopher Nolan movies, and they’re still pretty cool towards this one. Maybe the way to put it is that Oppenheimer is the Christopher Nolan movie for people […]
Over the course of its 27-years-and-counting lifespan – a geological epoch, by summertime movie standards – the Mission: Impossible movies have tried on many different guises and been many different things. But one of the things they have been the most consistently, going back at least to the free-climbing and knife-against-the-eyeball scenes in 2000’s Mission: […]
It’s odd to say of Insidious: The Red Door, no less than the fifth film in a series, “that sure seems like an unnecessary sequel”, but the Insidious series has followed a crooked path. First there was Insidious, which premiered in 2010 but for all intents and purposes is a 2011 film, and it was […]
If anything makes me happy about the existence of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a bloated and dour attempt at nostalgia-scraping that primarily demonstrates that there really probably wasn’t any artistically valid reason to give the swashbuckling archaeologist his third consecutive “grand farewell tour” in a series that only runs to five films, […]
The defining fact about 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is that it isn’t Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. On its own, this fact is hardly distinctive. Many, if not indeed most, movies are not Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The key difference is that Indiana Jones and the Last […]
A review requested by Michael, 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! We have absolutely no evidence that this is actually how it went down (arguably, we have evidence to […]
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is a little bit sloppy and narratively cluttered, it has unexceptional visuals, I didn’t buy either of its lead characters as written and only one of them as performed, and its modestly diverting action setpieces are hindered by how weightless the wall-to-wall CGI bringing them to life is. It is […]
We are living in a golden age of movies for children that present metaphorical parables about racism, in which the metaphor is horrendously bad and probably makes the pro-racism argument more effectively than the anti-racism argument. Not a good thing to have a golden age of. But anyway, here were are with the 27th feature […]
The biggest problem that was always going to face Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is that it was never going to have the staggering shock of the truly new and revolutionary. Even if the first sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse were to have a story more expansive and elaborate than that film (and it […]
