Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

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. In the week now ending: Downton Abbey: A New Era is a movie with a script by Julian Fellowes, focused on […]

A review requested by Yourself, 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! One hates to belabor how baffling the 1980 feature film version of Popeye isĀ  as an aesthetic object; […]

The New Hollywood Cinema was largely a young man’s game, with most of its leading lights part of the first film school generation. Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Michael Cimino were both born in 1939; Brian De Palma in 1940; Martin Scorsese in 1942; Terrence Malick in 1943; George Lucas and John Milius in […]

I am happy to present this feature’s second Altman film, and the first not to hold the distinction of being the worst thing he ever made. Robert Altman was good at many, many things, but one of his stocks in trade was the genre-bender: making a war movie, or a film noir, or a Western, […]

Since Robert Altman died two months ago, I haven’t had a chance to watch any of his films, either familiar to me or new, which is frankly a bit awful. After all, at the time of his death, he was the greatest American filmmaker. Last night, I finally had my chance to watch either The […]

Author’s note: I was a romantic 24-year-old and it seemed like Altman was going to die soon – he did – so please just ignore that utterly deranged 10/10, 5/5 score. I stand by the rest of it, mostly. The first scene in Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion consists solely of […]