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. […]

The phrase “generous to a fault” irresistibly suggests itself in connection with the feature film Barbie, a combination of toy commercial, exercise in feminist critical theory, anti-capitalist satire, and celebration of the ennobling power of consumerism directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, who certainly deserves some credit for having been assigned an almost impossible unfair […]

Actually trying to talk about Asteroid City, on any level more involved than “I really liked it, best movie of 2023 so far, 4.5 stars out of 5” (which is, for the record, the short version of this review) feels like willfully stepping into the world’s most obvious trap. There’s a recurring plot point in […]

With Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, writer-director James Gunn has achieved something, in my eyes, that I don’t think has ever happened before: he’s completed an entire trilogy of comic book movies where none of the three entries have been a disappointment. Probably the closest we’ve come before now has been the Christopher Nolan […]

In 2017, John Wick: Chapter 2 opened by showing footage from the 1924 Buster Keaton comedy Sherlock Jr., one of the greatest stunt-driven movies of all time, and the gesture was an obvious, swaggering brag: “what we’re up to here is just as good as Keaton”. And for the next two hours, director Chad Stahelski […]

The low-hanging fruit first: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is complete garbage as an Ant-Man movie. 2015’s Ant-Man and 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp are two of the most perfectly-matched films in the vast corpus of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, now arriving at its 31st feature film, providing almost identical experiences, and in their offbeat […]

A review requested by Benjamin, 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! Rear Window is a film about the prurient voyeurism of watching movies. You know this. I know this. […]

In the thirteen years since James Cameron’s last new feature, Avatar, I have increasingly come to treasure his particular mode of popcorn filmmaking, which I feel didn’t used to be rare, but basically has been dead as dead can be for all of those thirteen years. It is a mode of complete, unyielding sincerity, mixed […]

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 […]

George Miller’s directorial career, which only now arrives at Feature Film #10, 43 years after his debut, consists basically of only weird movies and very weird movies, which should make me pause before saying that Three Thousand Years of Longing is the weirdest, and yet here we are. This is, effectively, his “one for me” […]

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: at a sufficiently far remove, Thor: Love and Thunder is ultimately based on the legends and mythology of Northern […]

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: at a sufficiently far remove, Thor: Love and Thunder is ultimately based on the legends and mythology of Northern […]