Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

There are those filmmakers whose artistic focus is so much on the creation of deeply over-designed worlds and heightened visual style, and so little on anything resembling tight storytelling and naturalistic emotions (I am, to be clear, not saying that this is a bad thing), that learning they are about to make their very first animated feature pretty much exclusively leads to thr response, “oh, well of course you are, […]

June Bugs month concludes where Guillermo del Toro’s English-language career begins. This week, Tim and Brennan are discussing the compromised ‘90s relic MIMIC! ******************************************************************* Love the Mimic episode? Leave us a review! Other places to follow Alternate Ending. Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | Twitter Tim Letterboxd – Brennan Letterboxd Support Alternate Ending and check out our member perks, via our Patreon page!

One does try to see absolutely everything worth seeing, and sometimes it’s suddenly mid-March, and one must admit that one has failed. And since Oscar weekend is pretty much the official end of any given movie year, it felt like I had better hustle up and publish the 90% complete version of my year-end top 10, rather than wait until some distant point in the infinite future to get it […]

I’m in a state of perpetual, complete mental exhaustion – you have perhaps noticed the “once a fortnight” review-posting schedule – but not so much that I couldn’t participate in the most ridiculous of all film nerd rituals: predicting what will win Oscars on Sunday, 12 March. This is, across the board, the hardest year to predict that I can remember, with three of the four acting categories feeling almost […]

DreamWorks Animation, once the unlovely home of such crimes against animation as Shark Tale and Bee Movie, has been quietly handing Disney and Pixar their asses on a platter for so long now that it should no longer come as a surprise when it happens, but it still feels like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish can’t possibly be as good as it is. With this film, DreamWorks comes full […]

Some folks love the Oscars, and obsessively follow them every year, nomination announcements to award campaigning to treating the grand ceremony like their Super Bowl. On the other hand, some folks hate the Oscars, and think it’s simply Hollywood patting themselves on the back, while largely ignoring both quality big-budget populism and great arthouse cinema in favor of vanilla, middle-of-the-road “crowd-pleasing” formula (AKA Oscarbait). And then there are folks who […]

“These two unrelated movies constitute a trend” is not by any stretch of the imagine my favorite bad habit in film criticism. Yet it seems awfully hard not to notice that December 2021 has borne witness to two different movies made by A-list Oscar-winning directors that are both technically new adaptations of non-movie media, but are both in effect remakes of beloved cinematic classics, and in both cases the A-list […]

So good to be back this week, with our last Top 5 episode of 2021!  As we celebrate the upcoming release of Guillermo Del Toro’s upcoming adaptation of Nightmare Alley, we couldn’t help but reflect on our favorite movie con artists.  Fair warning, we had some pent up energy from missing each other the last few weeks, so please excuse the chaos (or at least we’ll use that as an excuse). […]

Judged purely on the basis of how many directors I love have something coming out in the next few weeks, December 2021 is one of the most exciting-looking months I have encountered in the 16 years I’ve been writing about movies online. Now, that’s a different thing than “every one of those looks like a slam-dunk great movie”, but quite a few of them actually do, and of the ones […]

The phrase “elevated horror” gets bandied about pretty freely for something that has no concrete definition beyond “the kind of horror movies distributed by A24”. But there’s certainly something going on that deserves a word to describe it, a strain of unconnected movies that mix in horror with serious character drama. It is a very real tendency in contemporary horror cinema, and part of the reason I feel suddenly so […]

That the new film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1983 book The Witches would be worse than its source, and worse as well than the 1990 version of the story directed by Nicolas Roeg, is hardly any surprise at all, and really not even worth commenting on. What shocked me is just how bad it is, entirely on its own terms. Especially since those terms include being a collaboration between Robert […]

Tigers Are Not Afraid* is an especially miraculous kind of movie, the sort whose influences are so obvious it’s almost boring to talk about them (Vittoria De Sica’s 1946 Shoeshine and Guillermo del Toro’s 2001 The Devil’s Backbone are the most conspicuous ones that come to my mind), and yet the end result doesn’t feel beholden to any influence at all. It is very nearly a complete original, made up […]