Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

So, he we are again. Hallmark’s marathon of brand-new Jane Austen-themed rom-coms has been continuing throughout February. Have I mentioned that they’ve dubbed the month “Loveuary?” It’s a pun so rotten, they barely put any thought in. Anyway, it’s time to take a look at Love & Jane, the second of these four movies, which debuted […]

Categories: love stories, romcoms

It makes one feel at least slightly like an easy mark to be enormously enthusiastic for The Taste of Things, a movie that feels like it was created in a lab for people with middlebrow tastes who felt “sophisticated” when they watched European art cinema in the 1990s. It’s French. It stars Juliette Binoche. Approximately […]

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all! In honor of the occasion, Hallmark has seen fit to lift their moratorium on Jane Austen-inspired movies. As someone who has made it his mission to watch and review every feature adaptation of her work, I can speak with some authority about the fact that there was a truly unsettling profusion […]

Categories: love stories, romcoms

If you’ve ever thought that the story of how the blessed virgin Mary met and wed the Nazarene carpenter Joseph before the two of them traveled to Bethlehem in time for her to give birth to the Son of God would be a really great subject for a teen romcom… wow. I am concerned about […]

The new “guess we have to call it a biopic, what other word fits?” Priscilla, directed by Sofia Coppola from a screenplay she adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoirs, is exactly what you suspect it is, though exactly what you suspect it is depends on your tastes and history with the director. Do you find […]

Parting is such sweet sorrow. The After franchise has been in our lives for four years, and while these movies certainly haven’t been the worst thing that has happened to the world in the period between 2019 and 2023, they’re at least in the Bottom 10. But I can’t quite pretend that I’m happy this […]

So, here’s the thing. An adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s 2019 novel Red, White, and Royal Blue is kind of a gimme for any filmmaker. It comes ready-made with a strong plot hook (the son of the U.S. president falls in love with his rival, the grandson of the British monarch), two handsome and charismatic male […]

Categories: love stories, romcoms

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 […]

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 […]

A review requested by Valentine, 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! Few films have ever embodied boundless joy at their own creation as much as Chungking Express. It is […]

Diversity.  It makes us great.  It makes us strong.  Quality representation of our many diverse cultures in our many diverse films is so important.  And that’s why it’s so wonderful that, thanks to Netflix and a plucky creative team, the broader Latin American community finally has Christmas with You, a sickly-sweet, forgettably mediocre Christmas movie […]

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 […]