Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

A review requested by Looneygamemaster, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. The version of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T that we have is the hastily-reworked version of a more ambitious and potentially even more bizarre original cut for which the materials no longer exist, so let’s not get excited. […]

If you have set yourself the task of making a movie prequel to probably Roald Dahl’s best-known children’s book, 1964’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and what you are actually doing is making a prequel to the 1971 film based on that book, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but six of one, half-dozen of […]

Wish, the 62nd animated feature produced by Walt Disney Animation studios, was very consciously, one might even say laboriously conceived to be the big capstone to the Disney 100 celebrations, in which the Walt Disney Company celebrates the anniversary of its incorporation, as Disney Brothers Studio, on 16 October 1923. Given that 2023 turned out […]

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 […]

Presuming that Trolls Band Together represents the conclusion of DreamWorks Animation’s Trolls Trilogy – and given DreamWorks’s historical and ongoing shamelessness about resurrecting any franchise whose brand name seems to have a few dollars left to squeeze out of it, this is a terrible presumption – the least we can say is that leaves us […]

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! There’s nothing unusual about two films with an unplanned resonance with each other coming out at about the […]

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 […]

I’m not sure that 1986 is the literal earliest year it’s even possible to conceive of such a thing as a feature film adaptation of a video game (the Pac-Man television series was already four years old at that point, and if you can make a television series based on a video game, you can […]

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 […]

Around the time that the Japanese animated feature Inu-oh premiered at the 2021 Venice International Film Festival, its director, Yuasa Masaaki, announced that he’d be taking a break of indeterminate length. Few people can claim to have better earned such a thing: after co-founding the animation studio Science SARU in 2013, Yuasa sank an absolutely […]

There’s always something fascinating and strange about when an established film property is given new life as a stage musical and that musical eventually wends its way back to the screen. We’re here to talk Matilda the MusicalĀ (with music and lyrics by Tim Minchin and book by Dennis Kelly, also on screenwriting duty) so obviously […]

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 […]