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 […]
In the very first scene of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, screenwriters J.K. Rowling and Steven Kloves make “Dumbledore is gay” canonical in the Harry Potter universe. At the far side of 142 impossibly unhurried minutes, this will turn out to have been the most consequential narrative development of the film. After three films, […]
I’m always a sucker for films that tell us early on how we are to approach them, and The Northman – the third feature film directed by Robert Eggers after 2015’s The Witch and 2019’s The Lighthouse, and the one where I’m comfortable declaring in front of all the world that he’s officially my favorite […]
There is something indescribably soothing about the existence of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in its current form. And that starts right with the fact that it’s been titled Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and not, like, Sonic the Hedgehog: Knuckle Down or Sonic the Hedgehog: Tails I Win, or Sonic the Hedgehog: In the Shadow of […]
The Lost City is about as close to being a direct remake of the 1984 Robert Zemeckis film Romancing the Stone as I can imagine somebody trying to get away with, without acquiring the rights to that film. I lead with this not because I plan to spend the rest of this review using that […]
Video game adaptations are, one sometimes suspects, inherently doomed. Either the source material doesn’t have any story and so one has to be welded on crudely, or it has enough story to cover a 20-hour experience that has to be basically started from scratch to fit feature length, and in either case, the story is […]
A review requested by Kelleson, 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! In making the 1965 megabudget epic The Great Race, director Blake Edwards had the avowed goal of making […]
This review addresses, with a fairly free hand, plot elements that I, for one, wouldn’t really consider to be “spoilers” for Spider-Man: No Way Home, but I imagine somebody hoping to enter the film wholly pure and ready for surprises would be outraged to learn some of these things. Proceed accordingly. For a movie that represents […]
1984’s Ghostbusters is a pretty damn good movie – prone to being over-praised by nostalgic fans, but pretty damn good – and it doesn’t seem like it’s all that difficult to understand why. But for whatever reason, it seems impossible to replicate it. Setting aside the question of the many sci-fi action-adventure comedies that clearly […]
If one is adapting the work of comic book artist and author Jack Kirby, particularly the era of Jack Kirby when he was obsessed with Chariots of the Gods and trying to create extraordinary new cosmologies for first the DC and then the Marvel universe, I think the obviously correct thing to do would be […]
The 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune offers one of the most interesting of all wrinkles to auteur theory, as it is generally understood. The film was the third feature directed by David Lynch, and the last before he became “David Lynch” as we now understand that phrase with 1986’s Blue […]
Author’s note, March 2024: I’m leaving my original rating intact, but in retrospect, I was hedging against the fear that Dune: Part Two, if and when it was made, would let this film down. As such a thing did not end up happening, consider this to be a 4-star review in all but name. When […]
