Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

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If you have set yourself the task of making a movie prequel to probably Roald Dahl’s best-known children’s book, 1964’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and what you are actually doing is making a prequel to the 1971 film based on that book, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but six of one, half-dozen of […]

Presuming that Trolls Band Together represents the conclusion of DreamWorks Animation’s Trolls Trilogy – and given DreamWorks’s historical and ongoing shamelessness about resurrecting any franchise whose brand name seems to have a few dollars left to squeeze out of it, this is a terrible presumption – the least we can say is that leaves us […]

A review requested by Kevin, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. An older review of this film can be found here. It’s clear right from the title of 2008’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird (which I believe to be a direct translation from the Korean) that the film intends […]

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 […]

The phrase “generous to a fault” irresistibly suggests itself in connection with the feature film Barbie, a combination of toy commercial, exercise in feminist critical theory, anti-capitalist satire, and celebration of the ennobling power of consumerism directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, who certainly deserves some credit for having been assigned an almost impossible unfair […]

Actually trying to talk about Asteroid City, on any level more involved than “I really liked it, best movie of 2023 so far, 4.5 stars out of 5” (which is, for the record, the short version of this review) feels like willfully stepping into the world’s most obvious trap. There’s a recurring plot point in […]

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 […]

The career of writer-director Nicole Holofcener has been one of immaculate consistency. In terms of quality: almost all of her films fall into a snug little sweet spot of “awfully good and lovely without ever being (or striving to be) bash-you-over-the-head-Great”, and while this may sound like a mild insult, that’s the sweet spot that […]

The biggest problem that was always going to face Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is that it was never going to have the staggering shock of the truly new and revolutionary. Even if the first sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse were to have a story more expansive and elaborate than that film (and it […]

A review requested by Dave, 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! History recalls 1983’s Local Hero, the third feature written and directed by Bill Forsyth, as the inspiration for […]

Categories: british cinema, comedies

A review requested by Kelleson, 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! Midway through director Frank Henenlotter’s sixth and (thus far) last narrative feature, the 2008 Bad Biology, one of […]