Thank you, one and all, for visiting our new site. The internet is full of movie reviews and movie reviewers, and we’re grateful to you for deciding to come here for both.
What you see before you is a work in progress: with eleven years of archived reviews from the now-defunct blog Antagony & Ecstasy, it’s going to take us quite a while to get all of them reformatted for the bigger and better Alternate Ending site. We appreciate your patience during our growing pains!
In the meantime, we’d like to tell you a little bit about ourselves. What makes Alternate Ending different from all the other film sites on the internet? Well, we humbly suggest that it’s the three of us, Carrie, Rob, and Tim: very different people with very different thoughts about the movies. Too many film sites cater to the same kind of audience, with one overwhelming voice in the writing, but what we treasure at Alternate Ending is diversity: diversity of opinion, diversity in belief about what film should do and how it should do it. We want to celebrate our different opinions, and celebrate yours as well.
This isn’t a only site for people who just want to talk about the latest hot new movies in theaters right this minute, though that’s part of it. This is a site for people who can’t get to the theater until the third week a film is out; a site for people who just want to find something great to stream online after the kids have gone to sleep, a site for people whose favorite pastime is to grab a bunch of classic films on DVD from the library and watch them all weekend. It’s a site that believes that every great movie is a wonderful new treasure, whether you see it the night of its premiere or fifty years later.
We value your readership; we also value your time. We’ve done the work of discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time, so you don’t have to; therefore, we’ve come up with a rating system that reflects the world we live in, where you can’t always go see everything you might want to.
The first part of the system grades a movie’s Quality, on a five-star scale. This is where we’re wearing our critics’ hats, and we’re trying to let you know how good we thought a film was: how well-made, how emotionally powerful, how entertaining, how engaged we were by the story.
A must-see for anybody who cares about movies
Extremely good, and we’d definitely prod you to go see it
It’s okay. If it sounds interesting to you, it’s not worth avoiding
It’s worth avoiding. Mediocre or even actively bad
Run away as fast as you can
But how great a film is doesn’t tell the whole story. Sometimes you have to make hard choices about where to spend your time and money, and that’s where we try to let you know about whether the movie gives you Bang for Your Buck: is it worth seeing in the theater, or can you wait for streaming and DVD? Plan an evening around it, or put it on in the background while you’re washing dishes?
Worth every penny to see it ASAP on the biggest screen you can find
A big enough spectacle that you’ll regret not seeing it in the theaters
At least worth $5 Tuesday, or definitely pay to stream it when you can
Wait to catch it for free on Netflix or Amazon Prime: it’ll hold up fine on TV
They should pay you, this is as much fun as a magazine article on the same topic
Now that you now a little bit about us, go ahead and explore our offerings! Tim has thousands of movie reviews for you to read, and Rob & Carrie have hours and hours of podcasts. Any questions? E-mail us at contact [at] alternateending.com, or bother us on Twitter!