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 […]
Five films into a series that hasn’t really shown any signs of losing its audience is an odd time to decide to course-correct for quality; even less so when the series is the signature franchise of Illumination, an animation studio that has never yet indicated that it feels terribly worried about quality in any meaningful […]
The grand-scale spectacular biopic Elvis (the fourth narrative treatment of the life of Elvis Presley in any filmed medium to go by that precise title, and at 159 minutes, somehow, also the shortest*) is the first feature directed by Baz Luhrmann in the nine years since The Great Gatsby. It’s been considerably longer since his […]
Serial killer movies and TV shows are common as dirt, and most of the serial killers within them feel a bit commonplace as well: you’ve got your brutish animal menace, you’ve got your erudite reptilian wits, you’ve got your soft-spoken weirdo with an unnerving stare. There aren’t all that many movie serial killers who actually […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A review requested by Kevin, 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 later years, Film Twitter has (in its Film Twitter way) decided that M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 feature […]
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 […]
With Don’t Breathe 2, it becomes officially impossible not to conclude that co-writers Fede Álvarez & Rodo Sayagues just don’t know how audience identification and sympathy work. Their 2016 thriller Don’t Breathe (directed by Álvarez) was broadly liked, but certainly not by me: I found it to have wantonly miscalculated in assuming we’d effortlessly side […]
