There are those filmmakers whose artistic focus is so much on the creation of deeply over-designed worlds and heightened visual style, and so little on anything resembling tight storytelling and naturalistic emotions (I am, to be clear, not saying that this is a bad thing), that learning they are about to make their very first […]
To be fair to the makers of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, from Marvel Studios capo Kevin Feige to director/co-writer Ryan Coogler and all the way on, they were facing a no-win situation. Chadwick Boseman, the charismatic star of the 2018 Zeitgeist-dominating smash hit Black Panther, died tragically young of cancer at the age of 43 […]
A review requested by Harold, 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 cannot say of the 2002 miniseries Dinotopia that it has small ambitions. Packed into its three parts, […]
Due to unforeseen circumstances, I wound up watching The School for Good and Evil in two sections: the first hour and fifteen minutes in one go, the remaining hour and ten minutes a while later. After section one, I thought the negative critical reception seemed unfair. Sure, the CGI wolf heads attached to the guard […]
To wrap up the summer movie season, 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 wide-release film from the last few weeks. From August 19: one of the specific things that the particular species of bipedal apes commonly […]
“[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 […]
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 […]
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.” […]
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 […]
A review requested by Jack, 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 NeverEnding Story comes attached to a very important fun fact: it was, at the time of its […]
Nine years and two months separated the releases 2013’s Oz the Great and Powerful and 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, both directed by Sam Raimi. He made no other features between them (though he did some television work, and produced quite a bit), making this by far the longest break between projects […]
