Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

A review requested by STinG, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. If there is such a thing as “objective” quality in cinema, then Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is objectively a bad movie. Fortunately, there is no such thing as objective quality in cinema. Sure, you could point to lots […]

A review requested by Steve, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. There are two particular facts about the 1991 Hong Kong blockbuster Once Upon a Time in China that aren’t immediately obvious to the English-speaking viewer (though they’re easy to come by), and which seem to me very important for […]

There is certainly a very good film within Better Days. Arguably, in fact, there are three: a story about high school bullying, a story about the high pressure put upon teenagers to perform well academically, and a love story about two teenaged outsiders finding strength in each other’s presence. It’s not very hard to see […]

The film that has been released in the United States and the United Kingdom as [The] Iron Mask, with the article disappearing if you (like me) are west of the Atlantic – that banal little title covering up a truly dumbfounding number of AKAs in at least English and Russian including Viy 2, Journey to […]

To have made one of the most sublimely beautiful urban-set movies of a decade is a sign of talent. To have made two of them – maybe literally the two best-looking movies about cities of the whole of the 2010s – is a sign of outright genius. And that’s the place where director Diao Yi’nan […]

“The feature film directorial debut of former superstar Disney animator Glen Keane” cannot possibly help but be a big deal, even if it’s not a big deal. Apologies for trying to be cryptic right out of the gate, but I’m doing it with a purpose: the unfortunately reality is that Over the Moon – the […]

You might say, if you were a terrible person with a weakness for cheap wordplay, that Shadow is an anti-Hero. It is the work of director Zhang Yimou, one of the most celebrated directors in the world during the 1990s for his delicate character dramas in recent historical settings (the likes of 1990’s Ju Dou, […]

A review requested by Kevin, 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! It is entirely possible that Hero is the single most beautiful film of the 2000s. I’m not making […]

Recently, in reviewing the 14-hour La Flor, I suggested that most films that are very, very long achieve their great length in part by trying to make themselves deliberately unpleasant and hard to watch. Here we have a perfect case in point: An Elephant Sitting Still is three hours and 54 minutes long (so let’s […]

Midway is an English-language film financed substantially with Chinese money, directed by a German, about one of the defining American victories of World War II. If you’re thinking that means it’s probably a muddle, I have good news: you’re not wrong. We could put it another way: you know how Roland Emmerich has kind of […]

Nothing about Abominable is even mildly surprising (unless it’s that an English-language movie made by American creators and mostly at an American animation studio should be set in China and have a female protagonist, and neither of these facts are even briefly commented upon), which is kind of a great thing. It doesn’t feel like […]

I have said before and will, I am entirely sure, have reason to say it again: nothing in the whole world of filmmaking in the 2010s interests me as much as the Chinese film industry’s concerted efforts to establish itself as an internationally competitive alternative to Hollywood, concurrent with the swift rise of that country’s […]