Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Regardless of whether or not I should, in the year of our Lord 2023, want to extend any benefit of the doubt to director David Gordon Green, I cannot help but wish to, and in the case of his 16th feature, The Exorcist: Believer, the extension I would make is this: early in the film, […]

Parting is such sweet sorrow. The After franchise has been in our lives for four years, and while these movies certainly haven’t been the worst thing that has happened to the world in the period between 2019 and 2023, they’re at least in the Bottom 10. But I can’t quite pretend that I’m happy this […]

A review requested by Avshalom, 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! What a bizarre coincidence befell Paramount Pictures and Hollywood at large in 1990: two of the five Best […]

It’s odd to say of Insidious: The Red Door, no less than the fifth film in a series, “that sure seems like an unnecessary sequel”, but the Insidious series has followed a crooked path. First there was Insidious, which premiered in 2010 but for all intents and purposes is a 2011 film, and it was […]

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, […]

Scream VI is the first movie in the 27-year-old Scream franchise that strikes me as being very much “a generic Scream picture”, which is already an achievement. Most slasher franchises have felt like “a generic _____ picture” by the time the end credits have started rolling in their first entry. That we have made it […]

It’s not, like, at all hard to identify the core strengths of 2019’s Shazam!: a slightly ramshackle, Amblin-in-the-’80s approach to family-friendly fantasy, and the odd bidirectional chemistry between Jack Dylan Grazer as nerdy teen Freddy Freeman, and Asher Angel and Zachary Levi tag-teaming as, respectively, the scrawny teen and massive superhero versions of Billy Batson, […]

The low-hanging fruit first: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is complete garbage as an Ant-Man movie. 2015’s Ant-Man and 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp are two of the most perfectly-matched films in the vast corpus of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, now arriving at its 31st feature film, providing almost identical experiences, and in their offbeat […]

The 2019 anti-mystery Knives Out has a game cast and an interestingly annoying structural conceit, buried (but not very deeply!) below some very dumb social satire and “extremely online” cultural touchstones. It is very much a “fix this one thing, and you’ve really got something here” proposition, but unfortunately, it was written and directed by […]

The Parker Family Saga is the franchise you didn’t know existed. You are probably familiar—likely over-familiar—with the crown jewel, Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story (1983), cementing his reputation as a purveyor of perennial Christmas classics. If you are a little more film-savvy (and you are on this website), you might be aware of the multiple […]

Even for a director with more than 60 years of experience, remaking a canonical classic represents one hell of a daunting challenge. Now, to be both clear and precise, Jerzy Skolimowski’s 18th feature, EO, does not explicitly present itself as a new version of Au hasard Balthazar, directed by the great Robert Bresson and released […]

Unlike the other major horror franchises, the Halloween series has made room for so many mutually-incompatible narratives – there are five different branches of continuity distributed between thirteen films – that there’s a sense in which “this isn’t ‘really’ a Halloween film” is sort of an empty thing to say. Heck, the 1982 release Halloween […]