Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Dune: Part Two is as much the payment of a debt as it is a movie. In 2021, director Denis Villeneuve and his co-writers Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts presented us with an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s genre-defining 1965 science fiction novel Dune – which I guess we now ought to formally start calling Dune: […]

Since its 1985 publication, Don DeLillo’s most celebrated novel, White Noise, has been one of cinema’s white whales. In various superficial respects, the book has always appeared ripe for adaptation—characters are vivid; snappy dialogue abounds; there’s even a literally central catastrophe that unmistakably lends itself to visual pyrotechnics. Yet it’s taken nearly 40 years for […]

There are those filmmakers whose artistic focus is so much on the creation of deeply over-designed worlds and heightened visual style, and so little on anything resembling tight storytelling and naturalistic emotions (I am, to be clear, not saying that this is a bad thing), that learning they are about to make their very first […]

Technically speaking, Confess, Fletch is the third feature adapted from Gregory McDonald’s popular series of novels (published between 1974 and 1986) about Irwin Maurice Fletcher, occasional investigative reporter and near-constant wiseass. As far as any true Fletch fan is concerned, however, we’re starting fresh here, because the two movies starring Chevy Chase in the title […]

A review requested by Brian, 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 costume drama is a genre as old as the movies themselves (The Execution of Mary, Queen of […]

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 […]

A review requested by Gavin, 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! Tommy, the 1975 feature film adaptation of the 1969 concept album by The Who, is an erratic, garish […]

Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac feels like it would be a perfect candidate for being turned into a musical, and indeed it would appear that exactly that transformation has happened, multiple times, in both French and English. So arguably there’s actually nothing special about the new film Cyrano, except that it is, as […]

Author’s note, March 2024: I’m leaving my original rating intact, but in retrospect, I was hedging against the fear that Dune: Part Two, if and when it was made, would let this film down. As such a thing did not end up happening, consider this to be a 4-star review in all but name. When […]

In 1909, during the final ten years of his short life, Jack London published a novel called Martin Eden. The story of a young man attempting to make his way in the world by becoming a successful writer, the film was, and was understood to be, London’s attempt to showcase all of the maddening problems […]

We could run through a decent list of the things about the (for now) newest cinematic adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 children’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio that sound like they should be interesting, but are in fact not actually very interesting. This is different than saying the film is “bad”: it is on the […]