Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

So, he we are again. Hallmark’s marathon of brand-new Jane Austen-themed rom-coms has been continuing throughout February. Have I mentioned that they’ve dubbed the month “Loveuary?” It’s a pun so rotten, they barely put any thought in. Anyway, it’s time to take a look at Love & Jane, the second of these four movies, which debuted […]

Categories: love stories, romcoms

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all! In honor of the occasion, Hallmark has seen fit to lift their moratorium on Jane Austen-inspired movies. As someone who has made it his mission to watch and review every feature adaptation of her work, I can speak with some authority about the fact that there was a truly unsettling profusion […]

Categories: love stories, romcoms

So, here’s the thing. An adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s 2019 novel Red, White, and Royal Blue is kind of a gimme for any filmmaker. It comes ready-made with a strong plot hook (the son of the U.S. president falls in love with his rival, the grandson of the British monarch), two handsome and charismatic male […]

Categories: love stories, romcoms

We are living in a golden age of movies for children that present metaphorical parables about racism, in which the metaphor is horrendously bad and probably makes the pro-racism argument more effectively than the anti-racism argument. Not a good thing to have a golden age of. But anyway, here were are with the 27th feature […]

A review requested by Benjamin, 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! Rear Window is a film about the prurient voyeurism of watching movies. You know this. I know this. […]

The Netflix Christmas season is back, and as much as I would like to rejoice, 2022 is an astonishingly anemic year for the streaming service. In the past we have been treated with various entries in the Princess Switch and A Christmas Prince franchises along with variably high-concept one-offs like The Knight Before Christmas and A Castle […]

Categories: netflix originals, romcoms

In the 2001 masterpiece of big-budget studio fluff Ocean’s Eleven, George Clooney and Julia Roberts co-starred as bickering ex-spouses, whose sharp-tongued acrimony was so clever and adorable and spiked with gorgeous movie star energy that one can barely stand the crashing force of all the chemistry between them. So we know they can do better […]

How does it feel to be living through history, folks? You see, Bros is THE FIRST GAY MOVIE!!!!! with an all-queer main cast (sorry, Love, Simon) from a major studio (sorry, Fire Island and the entire New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s). Plus whatever other qualifications are necessary to announce that this tale of cis […]

Categories: romcoms

The classical romantic comedy has been dead for about a decade. Since the release of, let’s say, The Proposal, the genre has spent quite a bit of time lounging around the opium dens of streaming services and the Hallmark channel, occasionally belching out projects that either rise into the stratosphere, hooked to a baffling high […]

Categories: romcoms

It’s not like we weren’t due a proper gay Pride and Prejudice. The only one we have so far is the 2016 indie Before the Fall, which is better as a tourism video for Virginia hiking paths than a romantic drama. The Hulu project Fire Island is certainly a proper adaptation. Indeed, it’s a startlingly faithful […]

Categories: romcoms

Opinions about Cooper Raiff’s 2020 debut feature were sharply divided, as one might well expect of a movie called Shithouse. (Or S#!%HOUSE, as the poster censored it.) What came as a surprise was that those who despised it were put off not by vulgarity but by sensitivity. Raiff, then all of 22, not only wrote […]

The Lost City is about as close to being a direct remake of the 1984 Robert Zemeckis film Romancing the Stone as I can imagine somebody trying to get away with, without acquiring the rights to that film. I lead with this not because I plan to spend the rest of this review using that […]