Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

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 […]

When the Walt Disney Company dabbles in family-friendly science fiction, catastrophe follows. Around the turn of the 1980s, they tried to get in on that Star Wars action, with The Black Hole and TRON in 1979 and 1982. Soon after both flopped, the company was taken over in a hostile coup, as the animation division […]

To be fair to the makers of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, from Marvel Studios capo Kevin Feige to director/co-writer Ryan Coogler and all the way on, they were facing a no-win situation. Chadwick Boseman, the charismatic star of the 2018 Zeitgeist-dominating smash hit Black Panther, died tragically young of cancer at the age of 43 […]

In the 2001 masterpiece of big-budget studio fluff Ocean’s Eleven, George Clooney and Julia Roberts co-starred as bickering ex-spouses, whose sharp-tongued acrimony was so clever and adorable and spiked with gorgeous movie star energy that one can barely stand the crashing force of all the chemistry between them. So we know they can do better […]

Some films that are marketed with an emphasis on how much of a “passion project” they were for the people involved are obviously bullshitting us. This is not the case with Black Adam. That this film, the first big-screen adventure for the mid-tier DC Comics supervillain-cum-antihero, is a long-gestating passion project for star Dwayne Johnson […]

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 […]

Let’s at least give Don’t Worry Darling this much credit: it’s easy to imagine this being a much drearier and more haranguing social satire than it is. In large part, this is because the film has such an extraordinarily hard time keeping any of its many ideas straight, or developing any of them to any […]

A review requested by Carl, 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! It is highly likely that 1999’s The Story of Us would inevitably bring to mind the once-in-a-generation classic […]

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: in addition to having the most soullessly branded title of any superhero movie this year, DC League of Super-Pets […]

To begin with, I find the very title of DC League of Super-Pets unpleasantly provocative. Not the League of Super-Pets part; that’s mostly just describing the content, though I might wonder why the film bothered to so subtly rename the comic book Legion of Super-Pets. Probably because Warner Bros. assumed (and with reason) that movie […]

The Gray Man may very well be the end of an era. Over the last half a decade, Netflix has attempted to move into the blockbuster space, making hyper-expensive streaming projects to rival Hollywood’s theatrical output, initially staking their claim with the putrid, runny dribble of offal known as 2017’s Bright. They have continued to […]

There are things in Thor: Love and Thunder – the fourth movie to exclusively focus on the Marvel Comics version of the Norse god Thor, played by Chris Hemsworth, who thus becomes the first individual character to headline a tetralogy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – that are pretty damn good. And conversely, there are […]