Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

If there is one nice thing I can say about the threateningly-titled Spiral: From the Book of Saw – and I do think it is just the one thing – it’s that this represents a much braver attempt to haul the old Saw franchise back into the public eye than the last one. 2017’s Jigsaw was a […]

Ramin Bahrani has long since passed into the subset of directors whose best work, I concede, is almost certainly behind them, while my regard for that best work remains so high that I will continue to regard every one of their new films as an event of at least minor importance. And “minor importance” is […]

The mash-up at the heart of Breaking News in Yuba County makes perfect sense, even if the results are terrible. The film takes the lacerating cynicism of Gus Van Sant’s 1995 newsmedia satire To Die For and mixes it in with the “several idiots trying to run several different cons; violent farce ensues” of Joel […]

A review requested by STinG, 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! The path that Samurai Cop has taken through history is close enough to the path of Miami Connection […]

There’s only really thing a late-career Liam Neeson action movie has to do, which is show Liam Neeson engaged with the business of doing action. Not a high bar, and yet somehow, Honest Thief does not succeeded in clearing it. The subjective, simplistic word “boring” is the single worst one for any critic to ever […]

In two entirely unrelated ways, I Care a Lot perfectly showcases two of the foremost aesthetic limitations facing contemporary cinema. The simpler one to talk about is that it’s just really damn gross-looking, with the kind of chintzy digital cinematography that has come to define so many direct-to-streaming films (it has been divvied up between […]

John Lee Hancock wrote the first draft of the script for The Little Things in 1993 (for Steven Spielberg, an unbelievably counterintuitive choice for this grim, gloomy crime thriller), and it’s a great pity that we’ll never know what exactly went into that first draft, or what the finished film would have been like if […]

For as long as the Romanian New Wave of the mid-2000s could be identified as such, Corneliu Porumboiu has been, I think, the director to make the easiest, most likable films. This is mostly because he’s the only one of the major, exportable Romanian filmmakers to focus on comedies, however biting and bleak their satiric […]

For what would prove to be the final film of his self-imposed exile in West Germany, Ingmar Bergman wanted to finally honor the cinema of his host country, rather than keep making quasi-Swedish chamber dramas as if nothing had changed but the address of his studio. And indeed, that is very much what he ended […]

I would never have thought of this on my own, but now that I’ve been put in mind of it, it makes perfect sense that American International Pictures and Amicus Productions would team up together. You could never say that they occupy the same spot in their respective ecosystems, because the Hollywood and British film […]

Whether you consider it a strength, or the movie’s most damning flaw, I think this much cannot be denied: The Godfather, Part II knows the scale of the movie it’s following, and it is hellbent on topping it. 1972’s The Godfather, adapted from Mario Puzo’s 1969 crime novel, was never supposed to be one of […]

One should be careful in going overboard with praise for director Stuart Gordon, who was a fallible mortal like the rest of us – I have seen both Robot Jox and Fortress, I am well aware that the man could fuck up. But still, listen to this fun fact and tell me the man wasn’t […]