Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

A review requested by Devin, 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 housekeeping part first: the 1999 animated feature Adolescence of Utena (whose Japanese title more literally translates as […]

First Date, which premiered this week at – of all things – the Sundance film festival, is the epitome of a certain type of festival movie. With mid-budget publicity, it could easily compete in the winter wide release schedule, but for the fact that there isn’t a big enough Name in front of or behind […]

Categories: teen movies

A review requested by David, 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! In the interests of having some way to start talking about FLCL (pronounced, because why the hell not, […]

CODA is unbearably cloying and contains barely a single narrative beat that isn’t an ossified cliché. Naturally, it has been greeted with rave reviews and a spirited bidding war in the wake of its opening-night premiere at the Sundance Film Festival; elevating sentimental schlock made with little more than the most functional artistry has been […]

Freaky Friday the 13th is such an obviously good idea that the only remotely surprising thing is that it took until 2020 for somebody to make it. And while the film in question has been released under the truncated title of Freaky – as I understand it, Paramount’s lawyers raised a bigger stink about Friday […]

Miss American Pie A review by Brennan Klein I suppose I can’t say in good conscience that American Pie Presents: Girls’ Rules is the thing I least expected to happen in 2020, but it’s at least in the top 5. Lord knows you can’t keep a good franchise down, but the last peep we heard […]

Categories: comedies, sequels, teen movies

Senioritis Editor’s note: with this review of Spontaneous, we’re happy to welcome Brennan Klein to the team as “permanent guest” reviewer. At Brennan’s request, I’ll be marking out all of his reviews so you don’t accidentally think they’re by me, but we look forward to having him help cover some of the many VOD releases […]

Categories: comedies, horror, teen movies

So help me, I really do feel sorry for The New Mutants and the poor saps who made it. If all had gone according to plan, it would have slunk into theaters in April 2018, gotten bored reviews comparing it unfavorably to Logan as an example of trying to do a different genre than action-thriller […]

The late and quite unlamented (by me, anyway) horror subgenre of torture porn was, if it was anything, aggressively unpleasant. Watching extended scenes of human having miseries realistically inflicted upon them without the sweet release of death would sort of have to be; this is the difference between the torture films and other gore-driven subgenres, […]

In the wake of Smiles of a Summer Night, a major international hit that had been dismissed by Swedish critics (thereby setting up a pattern that would persist for the rest of his career; my instinct is to accuse the Swedish critics of snobbery), Ingmar Bergman took a year to regroup. In the ten years […]

There is, I think, an excellent possibility that there is not a worse film with better cinematography than Cool as Ice, the 1991 film where Janusz Kamiński was given more or less an entirely free hand to do literally whatever he wanted. And oh my word, did he ever run with that. View it as […]

A review requested by WBTN, 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! Francis Ford Coppola’s popular reputation lies almost exclusively on the four films he made during the 1970s, every […]