A review requested by Travis, 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! Two decades into the 21st Century, the phrase “a Sam Raimi superhero movie” surely takes us straight to […]
Prior to seeing Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, a mainstream popcorn blockbuster-type comic book movie from a production company that has gotten quite a lot of mileage out of casting wonderful actors in roles that are much too small for them, I’ve been a bit snarky in talking about it like the […]
The Suicide Squad is one of the most pleasantly “that was exactly the movie I assumed it would be” movies in ages. That is to say: it has always been very clear that it would be better than 2016’s Suicide Squad, to which it is a very vaguely-related sequel. It has also always been very […]
In deference to the very vocal minority of internet cinephile types who have decided to use the new film Old to declare that M. Night Shyamalan has Actually Always Been Good, I will say this: the directing certain is not lazy. Shyamalan has quite a remarkable number of tricks laid out to make what’s very […]
Black Widow is, on balance, a largely blank experience: devoid of anything particularly obnoxious other than a 133-minute running time that it seems to view as an obligation rather than an opportunity for expansive storytelling, pretty formulaic in every single element of its storytelling, packed with hollow action scenes that don’t hurt to watch, nor […]
In fairness to Thunder Force, a high-concept science-fiction comedy vehicle for Melissa McCarthy written and directed by her husband Ben Falcone that was released as a direct-to-streaming exclusive in the first third of 2021: it is better than Superintelligence, a high-concept science-fiction comedy vehicle for McCarthy directed (but not written) by Falcone that was released […]
The Empty Man was shot in 2017 and had to wait for years to finally come out, caught in the net of 20th Century Fox being purchased by the Walt Disney Company and thus owned by a corporation that had absolutely no idea what in Hell’s name they were supposed to do with something this […]
The simple part first: the massive, monumental beast of a comic book movie released under the gravely ponderous title Zack Snyder’s Justice League is better in basically every single way that can be quantified than just plain Justice League from 2017, which is both fundamentally the same thing and so wildly, indescribably different that it […]
Not everyone will agree with me, I know, but to my mind, 2017’s Wonder Woman sets up a pretty high bar to clear, as one of the few superhero movies of the 2010s to successfully thread the needle between “superhero comics are modern mythology, with all the gravity that entails” and “popcorn movies need to […]
The Old Guard is the the most perfectly Netflix-ey film you could hope for out of Netflix’s attempt to kick-start a superhero franchise. It is, for starters, deeply unpleasant to look at, filmed through a muddy digital veil that pushes all of the colors hard towards grey, unless the entire purpose of the scene is […]
Lord knows if “sequel” is right word to describe The Vault of Horror, a 1973 anthology film based on horror stories published in the first half of the 1950s by EC Comics. Not, as it happens, stories published in the pages of The Vault of Horror, one of the company’s three dedicated horror titles. Of […]
It is a truth that I think to be self-evident that 1972’s Tales from the Crypt is the best-known and most widely-seen of Amicus Productions’s seven horror anthology films – maybe even their best-known and most widely-seen film, period. How much of this has to do with the fact that it shares a title and […]
