Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

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 […]

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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 […]

With Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, writer-director James Gunn has achieved something, in my eyes, that I don’t think has ever happened before: he’s completed an entire trilogy of comic book movies where none of the three entries have been a disappointment. Probably the closest we’ve come before now has been the Christopher Nolan […]

It’s not, like, at all hard to identify the core strengths of 2019’s Shazam!: a slightly ramshackle, Amblin-in-the-’80s approach to family-friendly fantasy, and the odd bidirectional chemistry between Jack Dylan Grazer as nerdy teen Freddy Freeman, and Asher Angel and Zachary Levi tag-teaming as, respectively, the scrawny teen and massive superhero versions of Billy Batson, […]

The low-hanging fruit first: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is complete garbage as an Ant-Man movie. 2015’s Ant-Man and 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp are two of the most perfectly-matched films in the vast corpus of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, now arriving at its 31st feature film, providing almost identical experiences, and in their offbeat […]

Other than the first episode, “On Leather Wings”, all reviews of Batman: The Animated Series are exclusive for Patreon subscribers. Click here to support Alternate Ending through Patreon. Season 1 (1992-1993) On Leather Wings (6 September, 1992) A- Christmas with the Joker (13 November, 1992) B- Nothing to Fear (15 September, 1992) A The Last […]

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 […]

Some films that are marketed with an emphasis on how much of a “passion project” they were for the people involved are obviously bullshitting us. This is not the case with Black Adam. That this film, the first big-screen adventure for the mid-tier DC Comics supervillain-cum-antihero, is a long-gestating passion project for star Dwayne Johnson […]

It’s in the nature of adolescence to rebel—against your parents, against your background, against anything that defines you in a way that doesn’t match your evolving self-image. Every coming-of-age story sees its protagonist reject the status quo and seek out something unfamiliar and/or expressly forbidden. Some go further than others, though, and Funny Pages—the directorial debut […]

Originally, superhero comic books were aimed primarily at children, and so were the movies based upon those comic books. That’s not to say that plenty of adults didn’t enjoy 1978’s Superman and 1989’s Batman and 2002’s Spider-Man (2002), all of which were massive four-quadrant blockbusters. Still, there was a time, not so very long ago, […]

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 […]