Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

A review requested by STinG, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. If there is such a thing as “objective” quality in cinema, then Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is objectively a bad movie. Fortunately, there is no such thing as objective quality in cinema. Sure, you could point to lots […]

A review requested by Steve, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. There are two particular facts about the 1991 Hong Kong blockbuster Once Upon a Time in China that aren’t immediately obvious to the English-speaking viewer (though they’re easy to come by), and which seem to me very important for […]

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 […]

Prior to seeing Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, a mainstream popcorn blockbuster-type comic book movie from a production company that has gotten quite a lot of mileage out of casting wonderful actors in roles that are much too small for them, I’ve been a bit snarky in talking about it like the […]

I have one thing about Disney’s new live-action Mulan that makes me extremely happy: it’s not a mindless shot-for-shot remake of the 1998 animated film, and in this respect is considerably less irksome than the 2017 Beauty and the Beast and the 2019 Aladdin and The Lion King, the other remakes of films from the […]

It is difficult to avoid overvaluing 1994’s Street Fighter is. Okay, it’s actually very easy to avoid that, since Street Fighter is a massive failure, the grotesque mutant child of a calamitous shoot. You know all the stories about movies like Casablanca or Jaws, where the production history is just one catastrophe after another, they […]

You might say, if you were a terrible person with a weakness for cheap wordplay, that Shadow is an anti-Hero. It is the work of director Zhang Yimou, one of the most celebrated directors in the world during the 1990s for his delicate character dramas in recent historical settings (the likes of 1990’s Ju Dou, […]

A review requested by Kevin, 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 entirely possible that Hero is the single most beautiful film of the 2000s. I’m not making […]

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. The week just ended: Keanu Reeves has spent some 20 years now as a sometimes hand-to-hand combat god, as John Wick: […]

A review requested by Salim Garami, 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 story of how Miami Connection came into the world warms my heart and provide me with […]

In what surely counts among the least-surprising developments of the 2017 movie year, it turns out that you can’t keep making the same feature-length commercial over and over again with the same plot and the same jokes, and expect that it’s going to keep working out. 2014’s The Lego Movie remains a modern miracle for […]

It might be a fun idea to think up ways to tell the same basic biographical story depicted in Birth of the Dragon – in 1964, on the brink of his explosion into pop culture stardom with TV’s The Green Hornet in 1966, San Francisco-based Wing Chun master Bruce Lee (Philip Ng) squared off with visiting […]