Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

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 […]

You have perhaps heard of The Godfather. It is a three-hour movie about the Mafia, released in 1972 by a studio that had been losing money at a steady clip, directed by an up-and-coming filmmaker whose last film had been a major flop (he was hired, in large part because the desperate studio knew that […]

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! Francis Ford Coppola’s popular reputation lies almost exclusively on the four films he made during the 1970s, every […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: Despicable Me 3 protracts the adventures of a bad guy who we were encouraged to like for his badness, […]

A second review requested by Patton with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. How in the name of the good Lord does one even go about starting to discuss Apocalypse Now? It’s among the small population of films about which I think it’s more or less impossible to […]

Whatever sequence of events, marketing pressures, shifting audiences preferences, and directorial indulgences contributed to the death of the New Hollywood Cinema at the dawn of the 1980s, it’s satisfyingly easy to point out when the corpse stopped twitching. In February, 1982, New Hollywood idol and godfather, if you will (and if you won’t, it’s no […]

In 2007, noted moviemaking crazyperson Francis Ford Coppola ended a ten-year absence from cinema with Youth Without Youth, a self-indulgent, talky, artsy, pretentious mess of a motion picture. His follow-up, Tetro, is happily… well, I don’t know if I should call it a return to form, because who the hell can say what “form” is […]

I am not about to ask whether Francis Ford Coppola is actually a good director or just a hack who got lucky a few times in the 1970s. Even his worst films – which, admittedly, well outnumber his best films – are unmistakably the work of a man in possession of overwhelming creativity and skill. […]