Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

A review requested by Gavin, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. The first question that I think would be at the forefront of anyone’s mind upon a first viewing of Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night would be “how could such a thing possibly have come into being in […]

The question of Dakota Johnson is one I am not prepared to answer. Is she, in any conventional sense, a “good” actor? I honestly don’t know if there’s enough evidence to judge. She is, I think, a very disrespectful actor: when she is handed a bum script, as she has been handed one with Madame […]

As of the year of our Lord 2024, there have been three complete film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, which is a decent number for a book widely regarded as “unfilmable”. One of these, the 1984 Dune directed by David Lynch, is almost completely ineffective as a narrative film, but it sort of […]

Dune: Part Two is as much the payment of a debt as it is a movie. In 2021, director Denis Villeneuve and his co-writers Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts presented us with an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s genre-defining 1965 science fiction novel Dune – which I guess we now ought to formally start calling Dune: […]

To get the pedantic bit out of the way first, the Japanese title of Miyazaki Hayao’s twelfth and probably final feature film, the 21st and probably final theatrical feature released by Studio Ghibli, the great animation company he co-founded in the 1980s, is 君たちはどう生きるか. This translates to How Do You Live?, which is also the […]

Wish, the 62nd animated feature produced by Walt Disney Animation studios, was very consciously, one might even say laboriously conceived to be the big capstone to the Disney 100 celebrations, in which the Walt Disney Company celebrates the anniversary of its incorporation, as Disney Brothers Studio, on 16 October 1923. Given that 2023 turned out […]

Presuming that Trolls Band Together represents the conclusion of DreamWorks Animation’s Trolls Trilogy – and given DreamWorks’s historical and ongoing shamelessness about resurrecting any franchise whose brand name seems to have a few dollars left to squeeze out of it, this is a terrible presumption – the least we can say is that leaves us […]

Over the course of its 27-years-and-counting lifespan – a geological epoch, by summertime movie standards – the Mission: Impossible movies have tried on many different guises and been many different things. But one of the things they have been the most consistently, going back at least to the free-climbing and knife-against-the-eyeball scenes in 2000’s Mission: […]

A review requested by WBTN, 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! Any time a critic relies on the stock sentiment, “this is like nothing else,” they’re wrong. Everything is […]

If anything makes me happy about the existence of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a bloated and dour attempt at nostalgia-scraping that primarily demonstrates that there really probably wasn’t any artistically valid reason to give the swashbuckling archaeologist his third consecutive “grand farewell tour” in a series that only runs to five films, […]

A review requested by Morgan, 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! The first thing to say about the 2001 Japanese animated feature Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (generally […]

The defining fact about 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is that it isn’t Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. On its own, this fact is hardly distinctive. Many, if not indeed most, movies are not Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The key difference is that Indiana Jones and the Last […]