Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

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 […]

A review requested by Nathan, 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! Tokyo Godfathers, from 2003, is the weirdest of the five major projects completed by the great Japanese animation […]

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 […]

The most obvious way to sum up Violent Night – and when I say “most obvious”, I mean “so obvious that the film itself does so, explicitly” – is that it combines modern cinema’s two foremost Christmas classics that aren’t really in any significant way about Christmas, 1988’s Die Hard and 1990’s Home Alone, and […]

The text “A fable from a true tragedy” is the very first message that Spencer has for us, and this tells us the most important thing we need to know about it. Namely, this is not a biopic of Diana, Princess of Wales, but an impressionistic psychodrama based on the material of her largely unhappy […]

Every film director in the history of the medium has made, or will have made, their final film. Most of them scrape out some dumb nonsense, the kind of half-assed project that a fading, aging artist can get financed. The lucky ones are able to do so at least semi-knowingly, ending their career on a […]

I cannot think of many questions less burning than “what if Santa Claus was a resentful, embittered survivalist who had been almost completely ruined by the weak economy of the 2010s, and the only thing that reignited his desire to live at all was being hunted by an extraordinarily proficient assassin; and also Mel Gibson […]

I have certainly not seen every single movie released in 2020, but I have an extremely hard time imagining any of them beginning with a more profoundly horrible bit of screenwriting than Godmothered, a Disney thing that clearly hoped to capture some of that old Enchanted magic, and had to settle for being shit out […]

To begin with the only issue of any real importance: in the Netflix original movie The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two, Kurt Russell isn’t nearly as much pure, weightless fun in the role of Santa Claus as he was in 2018’s The Christmas Chronicles. This is in part, of course, because The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two […]

It is a truth that I think to be self-evident that 1972’s Tales from the Crypt is the best-known and most widely-seen of Amicus Productions’s seven horror anthology films – maybe even their best-known and most widely-seen film, period. How much of this has to do with the fact that it shares a title and […]

It’s early yet, but I wouldn’t be even a little bit surprised if The Lodge ends up being the most frustrating film I see in 2020. The film starts off amazingly well, with some unexpected and slithery character work, handing off the storytelling perspective from one character to another with absolutely no finesse, but so […]

A review requested by Andrew, 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! Amblin Entertainment is still with us, as we enter the third decade of the 21st Century (dear God, […]