Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

A review requested by Looneygamemaster, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. The version of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T that we have is the hastily-reworked version of a more ambitious and potentially even more bizarre original cut for which the materials no longer exist, so let’s not get excited. […]

To get the pedantic bit out of the way first, the Japanese title of Miyazaki Hayao’s twelfth and probably final feature film, the 21st and probably final theatrical feature released by Studio Ghibli, the great animation company he co-founded in the 1980s, is 君たちはどう生きるか. This translates to How Do You Live?, which is also the […]

Wish, the 62nd animated feature produced by Walt Disney Animation studios, was very consciously, one might even say laboriously conceived to be the big capstone to the Disney 100 celebrations, in which the Walt Disney Company celebrates the anniversary of its incorporation, as Disney Brothers Studio, on 16 October 1923. Given that 2023 turned out […]

Once Within a Time is on the one hand, a film that I feel compelled to praise for being unsafe and experimental, especially since it had every reason not to be: director Godfrey Reggio is an octogenarian these days, after all, and in the year of our Lord 2023, when the primary mode of so […]

A review requested by WBTN, 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! Any time a critic relies on the stock sentiment, “this is like nothing else,” they’re wrong. Everything is […]

One of the very first lines of dialogue spoken in the 1989 animated feature The Little Mermaid is “A fine strong wind and a following sea. King Triton must be in a friendly-type mood.” The approximately equivalent line of dialogue in the 2023 remake of that same film is “This is a dangerous time. Tonight’s […]

The best film of Disney’s ongoing, increasingly worn-out cycle of live-action (and/or photorealistic CGI that the studio stubbornly declares to be “live-action” as a marketing hook) remakes of its classic animated features is 2016’s Pete’s Dragon, which isn’t even a remake of an animated feature anyways, and that probably helped. It also helped that Pete’s […]

Shinkai Makoto makes one kind of film, and he makes it better than anybody else in the history of the medium: teen love story; major scenes take place against dramatic sunsets; sunlight glimmers off of pools of water; there’s rain; there are trains; in its last fifth, the story transforms from a smooth execution of […]

I’m not sure that 1986 is the literal earliest year it’s even possible to conceive of such a thing as a feature film adaptation of a video game (the Pac-Man television series was already four years old at that point, and if you can make a television series based on a video game, you can […]

A review requested by Andrew, 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! Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer was a film ahead of its time. 29 days ahead of its time, […]

It’s not, like, at all hard to identify the core strengths of 2019’s Shazam!: a slightly ramshackle, Amblin-in-the-’80s approach to family-friendly fantasy, and the odd bidirectional chemistry between Jack Dylan Grazer as nerdy teen Freddy Freeman, and Asher Angel and Zachary Levi tag-teaming as, respectively, the scrawny teen and massive superhero versions of Billy Batson, […]

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 […]