Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

It would be accurate to describe Beast as “the movie where Idris Elba kicks a CGI lion in the face”. But it would be even more accurate to describe Beast as “the movie where Idris Elba kicks a CGI lion in the face twice“, which of course means it is twice as good. And as […]

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 […]

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: in addition to having the most soullessly branded title of any superhero movie this year, DC League of Super-Pets […]

To begin with, I find the very title of DC League of Super-Pets unpleasantly provocative. Not the League of Super-Pets part; that’s mostly just describing the content, though I might wonder why the film bothered to so subtly rename the comic book Legion of Super-Pets. Probably because Warner Bros. assumed (and with reason) that movie […]

“[This thing] is like [this other thing]” is tawdry, cheap criticism, and when the things are both from a foreign culture to the critic writing the comparison, it is tawdry, cheap, and risks revealing a profound ignorance and limited frame of reference. Granting that, The Deer King is very much like Princess Mononoke. To pretend […]

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: Where the Crawdads Sing tells the story of a young woman who lives and thrives in a swampland, away […]

There are things in Thor: Love and Thunder – the fourth movie to exclusively focus on the Marvel Comics version of the Norse god Thor, played by Chris Hemsworth, who thus becomes the first individual character to headline a tetralogy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – that are pretty damn good. And conversely, there are […]

A review requested by STinG, 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! The reputation of Who Killed Captain Alex? unquestionably precedes it. The short version of the story behind what […]

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.” […]

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 […]

Was there any sense in which the world was clamoring for a sequel to 1986’s Top Gun? Any indication that the story told in that film was incomplete, or that it would be fruitful to return to its immodestly thin characters and scenario and see what else could be drawn from them? I would say […]

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 […]