Critic Reviews

Spoiler Alert is a film that tells a story of a not-so-perfect relationship that will make you laugh, cry, and feel like you're part of Michael and Kit's life.

Anchored by the ridiculously charming Aldridge's chemistry with Parsons (distant but effective in comparison), Spoiler Alert defies expectations throughout, refusing to adhere to one genre or storytelling convention.

What struck me most about Spoiler Alert was its nuanced look at a loving relationship.

Both Parsons and Aldridge surrender to the material, and we are moved as Kit and Michael come to a deeper understanding and appreciation of their love for each other.

Ultimately, the movie tells a story about two lives: complicated, filled with both love and pain, but well and fully lived.

Director Showalter (who mined similar territory in “The Big Sick,” one of the best movies of 2017) and screenwriters David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage display a deft touch for blending wry humor with heartfelt drama, and Jim Parsons and Ben Aldridge have a natural and comfortable chemistry in a story that hits a lot of familiar notes but contains some creatively clever devices while packing, yes, a whole lot of heart.

Just in time for the holidays, director Michael Showalter has gifted viewers with a good old-fashioned tearjerker, one that earns its tears without resorting to a brute force assault on your heartstrings. Spoiler Alert operates with a lot of humor and more than a little grace.

This is a nice film. A sweet film. A film you can watch with your mother-in-law.

Where the drama is headed is never in doubt, and the steps it takes to get there are often familiar. Yet by this time we are sufficiently invested in the couple to care deeply. If anything, the intrusion of mortality makes the relationship more believable as both Parsons and Aldridge (Epix’s Pennyworth) imbue their scenes with warmth and heart, regret and exquisite sadness.

When the film lets its guard down—namely, whenever Aldridge gets to deploy his charm as Kit or manages to let Field echo a weathered kind of Steel Magnolias screen presence—the film sings. Yet its attempts to distance itself from the very genre of a film it so clearly is (there wasn’t a dry eye in the house by the time I left my screening) end up shortchanging its impact.