2.5/5 | | Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night (1987) | Despite all of its elements that are individually deranged and visionary and feel like they were wrenched out of the pitch-black recesses of some underground animator's brain, the thing as a whole feels like such yawning, uninspired hackwork. - Alternate Ending |
4/5 | | Tumbbad (2018) | The film creeps into your bones and gives you a little shiver of discomfort at how very unknowable the world is. - Alternate Ending |
2/5 | | Madame Web (2024) | The thing that's definitely true of Madame Web is that it was absolutely butchered, just hacked apart by a screaming maniac with a cleaver, in post-production. - Alternate Ending |
3/5 | | Tremors II: Aftershocks (1996) | A whole lot more thoughtful than it had the slightest reason to be. - Alternate Ending |
3.5/5 | | Drive-Away Dolls (2024) | It's easy to call this "just a lark", but it's not just a lark, really; it's rare and wonderful for a lark to be this self-assured and swaggering. - Alternate Ending |
4/5 | | The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953) | Lively and peculiar enough to feel like a worthy experiment in trying to make Seuss-style visuals work in live-action. - Alternate Ending |
4/5 | | Dune: Part Two (2024) | Where it really comes into its own as a hugely satisfying Hollywood sci-fi epic is in the action-adventure material, which is also backloaded, so the very long film seems to keep getting bigger and richer as it goes along. - Alternate Ending |
2/5 | | Wonka (2023) | Irritatingly free of the "pure imagination" that it presumes to be its most sacred value. - Alternate Ending |
4.5/5 | | The Zone of Interest (2023) | It works brilliantly, it's just that the thing it works brilliantly at is being an off-putting slog. - Alternate Ending |
10/10 | | Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) | A brilliantly ambiguous film about ambiguity. - Alternate Ending |
4/5 | | The Boy and the Heron (2023) | Despite all of the heavy imagery, this is still a fundamentally generous depiction of a sad little kid who needs to learn that it's okay that other people want to love him. - Alternate Ending |
4/5 | | Godzilla Minus One (2023) | The technical quality of the effects is great. So, happily, is the artistic quality. - Alternate Ending |
1.5/5 | | Journey to Bethlehem (2023) | It's kind of hair-raising how just tacky this all is. - Alternate Ending |
1.5/5 | | Wish (2023) | The animation is ugly, the story is confusing, the characters are an unappealing jumble of badly-expressed traits, the voice acting is meager, the songs are an affront. - Alternate Ending |
3.5/5 | | Thanksgiving (2023) | Performing the requisite duties of a slasher film with the most sincerity and highest level of quality it can manage. - Alternate Ending |
3/5 | | Trolls Band Together (2023) | The whole movie feels a bit like a laboratory for playing with new examples of the series' defined aesthetic. - Alternate Ending |
3/5 | | The Nun II (2023) | Does not claim that its storytelling integrity is more important to it than providing a nice, rickety old thrill ride of bumps and shocks. - Alternate Ending |
4.5/5 | | Priscilla (2023) | Tough, tough stuff, and Cailee Spaeny and Sofia Coppola make it look so inevitable. - Alternate Ending |
1.5/5 | | The Exorcist: Believer (2023) | Congrats to the filmmaking team, I guess: they might have made some utter, contemptible trash, but at least it's not lazy trash. - Alternate Ending |
3/5 | | Saw X (2023) | The path that Saw X traveled to become the best-ever Saw movie was short, brightly-lit, well-marked and so obvious... make Tobin Bell the protagonist. - Alternate Ending |
2/5 | | Five Nights at Freddy's (2023) | It's all very tedious when it's not confusing, and it can't even count on atmosphere to salvage it. - Alternate Ending |
3/5 | | The Pope's Exorcist (2023) | No matter how much zany wackadoo nonsense you think it has flung at you, it still finds surprises and ways to remain fresh and unpredictable, quite literally up until the very last scene. - Alternate Ending |
4/5 | | Riki-Oh (1991) | A great deal of the film's appeal lies in its unselfconscious childish enthusiasm, an unrelenting delight in doing cool, stupid stuff and doing it as hard as you possibly can - Alternate Ending |
4/5 | | Once Upon a Time in China (1991) | As much a grave history lesson as a giddy celebration of its stunt team's physical prowess. - Alternate Ending |
5/5 | | Koyaanisqatsi (1982) | Crafting a way of seeing the world that is fresh and new. - Alternate Ending |
3/5 | | Once Within a Time (2023) | It's taking one big swing after another, connecting often enough for to be exciting to watch more than its frustrating. - Alternate Ending |
3.5/5 | | Oppenheimer (2023) | This is very clear, effective, disciplined prestige filmmaking, enough to make this one of the toniest pieces of Oscarbait that I expect to see this year - but it is Oscarbait. - Alternate Ending |
2/5 | | The Two Jakes (1990) | This simply isn't a very well-made thing, and it's not coming from any genuinely inspired place. - Alternate Ending |
3/5 | | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) | It's neat to look at, and it zips by with kinetic energy that nothing else starring these characters ever has. - Alternate Ending |
4.5/5 | | Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) | As energetic as one dares to hope a popcorn movie might be, in love with the capacity of movies to provide every sort of visual delight. - Alternate Ending |
1/5 | | Insidious: The Red Door (2023) | Takes the laziest of all routes, suggesting that what happened a decade ago shall happen again now in more or less exactly the same way. - Alternate Ending |
5/5 | | The Son of the White Mare (1981) | Unbelievably dazzling and powerful, using these strong, almost abstract collections of colors and shapes that evoke primal, forceful emotion. - Alternate Ending |
2/5 | | Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) | The whole opening of the film... is just a constant stream of sour notes. - Alternate Ending |
3.5/5 | | Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001) | Taken on its own terms, this is a very impressive piece of animation and sci-fi worldbuilding, telling its gloomy story of a man-made end-times through some wonderfully expressive visuals and increasingly heavy atmosphere - Alternate Ending |
3.5/5 | | Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) | An awfully good and deliciously watchable popcorn movie, made by probably the single most reliable director of popcorn movies in the history of American cinema, when he was still pretty close to the peak of his powers. - Alternate Ending |
3.5/5 | | Event Horizon (1997) | Approaches some very silly third-tier post-Lovecraft nonsense with a enthusiastic desire to make it the most enjoyably trashy version of itself possible. - Alternate Ending |
2.5/5 | | Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023) | Exists at the level of narrative sophistication of children idly mashing their toys together whilst making "pow, screech, aiieeeeeee" noises, which is sincerely better than any of the earlier movies were able to achieve. - Alternate Ending |
4.5/5 | | Asteroid City (2023) | Delightful, beautiful, phenomenally well-acted. - Alternate Ending |
3.5/5 | | You Hurt My Feelings (2023) | An indescribably pleasant vibe. - Alternate Ending |
2.5/5 | | Elemental (2023) | It is, not only for the incredible weakness of its central metaphor, the most unsound script that Pixar has ever turned into a feature film. - Alternate Ending |
4.5/5 | | Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) | An extravagant blend of styles and visual ideas and techniques that makes the bleeding-edge radicalism of the 2018 film seem downright boring. - Alternate Ending |
4.5/5 | | Local Hero (1983) | It plays it as the mixture of British kitchen-sink realism and Robert Altman that I never knew I wanted. - Alternate Ending |
1.5/5 | | The Little Mermaid (2023) | An exemplar of the Walt Disney Company's ongoing attempt to take what is beautifully expressive and aesthetically rich about its unmatched canon of animated features stretching back to 1937, and turn it into grey paste - Alternate Ending |
3.5/5 | | Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) | In the heart of one of the most carefully micro-managed, corporatised franchises in contemporary media, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Gunn and company... have managed to make three consecutive films that feel earnestly personal. - Alternate Ending |
3/5 | | Evil Dead Rise (2023) | It absolutely has the goods as a violent horror movie. - Alternate Ending |
2.5/5 | | Scream VI (2023) | Only when it stops the story cold to throw a bravura setpiece our way does it actually become exciting and propulsive. - Alternate Ending |
2/5 | | Peter Pan & Wendy (2023) | Grinds all of the fantastical elements out as much as can possibly be done for a story about using magical dust to fly - Alternate Ending |
4/5 | | Suzume (2022) | The film knows it's silly. It just doesn't care, because in addition to being silly, it is overwhelming and gorgeous and heartfelt. - Alternate Ending |
4/5 | | Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984) | Maybe more the harbinger of truly great films to come than a truly great film itself, but it has a ton of ambition, and it looks about as striking and atmospheric as I suspect it could have, in 1984. - Alternate Ending |
3/5 | | Sûpâ Mario Burazâzu.: Pîchi-hime kyushutsu dai sakusen (Super Mario Bros.:Mission to Save Princess) (1986) | What it absolutely never is, is lazy, and given the nature of this project, that's a genuinely masterful achievement; cash-in pop culture ephemera is rarely this prickly and aggressively random. - Alternate Ending |
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vTrZynrJ%2BirrW7xKxlnKedZLCztdOimqxnpJ66bq7RmrCtp55kurDCyJ6q