Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

69 years after Hondo Ishiro’s masterpiece Godzilla created the most iconic non-human monster in the history of world cinema, a period that has seen the release of 32 feature films starring the great lizard from Japan and a handful from Hollywood, as well a multiple television programs, it takes very little actual effort to have […]

There are two claims I would like to make about Saw X, and both of them surprise the hell out of me. The weaker claim, which is still a bit on the aggressive side, is that Saw X is the best of the ten Saw films stretching back to 2004, though the series has been […]

It’s very easy to look at a movie and declare it “a labor of love” whether you actually know that to be the case or not, but for Pearl, there’s no doubt about it. Literally the fact that it exists at all is the proof that it was a labor of love, and that co-writers […]

If you had asked me at the start of 2022 if I thought that 2009’s Orphan had lived on as a classic of modern horror, I’d have looked sort of through you for an awkward moment in a confused, glassy-eyed way before tentatively replying “the J.A. Bayona film?” And we’d have had a beat before […]

In the three-and-a-half decades since the release of the exquisitely focused and gnarly Predator, a high point in the careers of both director John McTiernan and star Arnold Schwarzenegger, that film’s sequels and spin-offs have all been built around complicated, cumbersome variations on the misguided quest, “you wanted more world-building, right? Just tons and tons […]

Whether you consider it a strength, or the movie’s most damning flaw, I think this much cannot be denied: The Godfather, Part II knows the scale of the movie it’s following, and it is hellbent on topping it. 1972’s The Godfather, adapted from Mario Puzo’s 1969 crime novel, was never supposed to be one of […]

After five films ranging from sub-adequate to freakishly bad, the idea that all it would take to make a satisfactory Transformers film would be to have 1) a prequel, 2) centered around one of the dullest characters in the franchise is ludicrous on its face. And yet here we are with Bumblebee, which manages not […]

A review requested by Gabe, 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! There is, in Shakespeare criticism, an inconsistently-applied and vaguely-defined term, “problem play”, which basically means that nobody knows […]

The 2010s have produced only a scant number of horror movies more top-to-bottom objectionable than 2014’s Annabelle, the flagrantly unnecessary prequel about an absurdly overdesigned haunted doll first seen in 2013’s The Conjuring. And given the repeated threats in the last couple of years that production companies Atomic Monster and New Line Cinema want to […]

There aren’t all that many endings that would seem to automatically forestall any possibility of a sequel, but surely “destroying the whole world in a massive nuclear explosion” would make that short, elite list. Nevertheless, after Beneath the Planet of the Apes played precisely that card, it fell to that film’s screenwriter, Paul Dehn, to […]

Return to the complete Twin Peaks index Within the last ten years or so, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me has undergone a substantial re-evaluation, and what was once greeted as one of David Lynch’s worst features has since been reclaimed by many fans as one of his best. I am a little sorry to […]

It’s not just that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is my favorite Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back; it’s how damned easy it was for me to come that conclusion. Like, not a fraction of a second of hesitation. For those of you who just wanted the opinion & would prefer to […]