Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

If anything makes me happy about the existence of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a bloated and dour attempt at nostalgia-scraping that primarily demonstrates that there really probably wasn’t any artistically valid reason to give the swashbuckling archaeologist his third consecutive “grand farewell tour” in a series that only runs to five films, […]

The defining fact about 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is that it isn’t Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. On its own, this fact is hardly distinctive. Many, if not indeed most, movies are not Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The key difference is that Indiana Jones and the Last […]

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 […]

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 […]

A review requested by Mandy, 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! 1991’s Night on Earth is a crucial pivot point in the offbeat and peculiar career of the offbeat […]

It’s very easy to look at a movie and declare it “a labor of love” whether you actually know that to be the case or not, but for Pearl, there’s no doubt about it. Literally the fact that it exists at all is the proof that it was a labor of love, and that co-writers […]

Editor’s Note: This article is courtesy of guest reviewer M.C. Steffen, who kindly wrote up his thoughts from a Chicago-based press screening we weren’t able to get to otherwise. Thank you to M.C. for his hard work! “Sadists never understand why other people don’t enjoy their sadism as much as they do,” Margaret (Rebecca Hall) […]

I think the fair thing to do is to regard Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank not with contempt that it exists, but with amazement that it survived to be released. Though I think you could temper that amazement with a little bit of contempt. That would be fair. Still, let’s not get too […]

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: Where the Crawdads Sing tells the story of a young woman who lives and thrives in a swampland, away […]

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 reputation of Who Killed Captain Alex? unquestionably precedes it. The short version of the story behind what […]

There are a few different ways we can make sense of the title of Mad God, a new stop-motion animated feature that’s also not very new at all: with some footage dating back to 1989, it’s one of the longest-in-production films to have ever been released. But probably the simplest explanation is the one we […]

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: Jurassic World Dominion continues its franchise’s burning question of what happens in a version of the modern world where […]