Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

As of its auspicously-numbered 13th feature, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, two of the three best features ever made by Illumination are its two most recent films (Minions: The Rise of Gru was the last one), so maybe we stand at the dawn of a new run of quality projects from that studio, during which […]

“Wouldn’t it be WILD if a black bear got totally fucked-up on cocaine?” “Yes, it sure would.” “Like, don’t you think that a bear on cocaine would just be CRAZY?” “It, yes, that would be weird, I wouldn’t want to meet that bear.” “Like, it’s a BEAR, and it’s on COCAINE.” “I mean, you said […]

We’re living through a golden age of “the rich are evil and out of touch, and must be destroyed!” pop culture objects being made by people who are, themselves, extremely rich and out of touch, and are acting (one suspects) less out of a place of good honest class betrayal than a neurotic need to […]

Categories: comedies, satire, thrillers

The 2019 anti-mystery Knives Out has a game cast and an interestingly annoying structural conceit, buried (but not very deeply!) below some very dumb social satire and “extremely online” cultural touchstones. It is very much a “fix this one thing, and you’ve really got something here” proposition, but unfortunately, it was written and directed by […]

There’s plenty of room to do a serious overhaul on the narrative formula of A Christmas Carol, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. As what surely must be the work of English-language fiction to have been adapted into the greatest number of different films, plays, television episodes, and I imagine other […]

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 […]

A review requested by Stephen, 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! I think there is a very strong argument to be made that Leo McCarey was the greatest conservative […]

The most obvious way to sum up Violent Night – and when I say “most obvious”, I mean “so obvious that the film itself does so, explicitly” – is that it combines modern cinema’s two foremost Christmas classics that aren’t really in any significant way about Christmas, 1988’s Die Hard and 1990’s Home Alone, and […]

Martin McDonagh’s best strength as a director, it is clear at this point, is that he gets to be in the exclusive business of making films with original screenplays by Martin McDonagh. With The Banshees of Inisherin, the celebrated playwright turned cinematic writer-director is now up to four feature films, and that’s ample evidence to […]

I’m not exactly sure how it is that directing a critically-acclaimed Oscar-nominated film that helped create an animation studio and remains the highest-grossing film in that studio’s history sends a fella to Director Jail, but that’s where Henry Selick has been for the thirteen years since making Coraline, still one of the best animated features […]

Rosaline, in every way, almost gets there. It almost pulls off an anachronistic attitude that feels sly and purposeful, rather than tonally muddled and wannabe-hip. It almost gives its heroine enough personality to evoke a whole human being. It almost indulges in a fun, twisty romantic sabotage plot; then, turning the tables, it almost makes […]

Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is not a good film, which comes as absolutely no surprise whatsoever. It is surprising, perhaps, that it isn’t much worse – and “much worse” is, to be fair, in the eye of the beholder. Nothing could be more understandable than somebody subjecting themselves to this film and declaring it an unmitigated […]