Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

The oldest film of which I am personally aware that features the scripted antics of a stunt dog is the Edison Manufacturing Company’s The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog, which came out in 1905. So, like, they’ve had a while to figure this out. And I think I am not making a controversial […]

A review requested by Not Fenimore, 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! So here we are, face-to-face with the all-time worst winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. […]

Any film as enervating as The Nightingale must be doing something right: it is one of the most upsetting, unpleasant, grueling films I have watched all year, and this is not something that happens without effort. If you consider (as I do) that the first mission of art is to trigger an emotional response in […]

Of all the characters who could get the “let’s check in on our old friends from years ago and see what they’re up to” sequel treatment, I would not have supposed that people who we last see dying in a stand-off with the cops would be good candidates. But underappreciated horror auteur Rob Zombie doesn’t […]

The Sisters Brothers is first and foremost just a damn solid Western. This isn’t really surprising: director Jacques Audiard (making his eighth feature film and his first in English) has largely made it his business to make damn solid movies in traditional genres, and it’s increasingly looking like A Prophet, which was more like an […]

Want another opinion? Check out Conrado’s thoughts on the film! Joel and Ethan Coen have, in their long career as the most interesting and probably best American-born filmmakers alive, dabbled in damn near every genre that a filmmakers in the last 30 years could possibly get away with dabbling in, but in some way it […]

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: Alpha demonstrates the time that humans first turned wolves into dogs. This relationship has been commemorated in countless artworks; […]

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: Alpha dramatises the time that humans first turned wolves into dogs. The subsequent relationship between species has been commemorated […]

I’m not sure if Jack London’s 1906 novel White Fang has remained more of a cultural touchstone in Europe than in its home country. I do know that the marketing push for the new Franco-Luxembourgian animated adaptation of the book seems to think that it’s a major cultural touchstone, but who’s to say. Regardless, one […]

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: Sicario: Day of the Soldado presents a uniquely ill-timed new take on the old trope of lawmen trying to […]

A review requested by Not Fenimore, 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! Of Mel Brooks’s first four feature-length comedies, which are also his four best, 1974’s Blazing Saddles is […]

The Rider isn’t sensu stricto a biopic of its star, Brady Jandreau, but it’s a pretty fine line. Jandreau was an up-and-coming rodeo star out of South Dakota when he fell off a bronco he was riding and suffered a debilitating brain injury, and there’s not a single word of that sentence that doesn’t also […]