Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

There’s one main reason any film gets a sequel: because some producers got a bit of money, and want to get a bit more. And for the great majority of sequels, that’s where it stops, which is why so many of them are such joyless retreads, doing the same thing but bigger and louder (or, […]

I do not, in general, harbor much nostalgia, nor warm feelings of any kind, for the 1990s. But if I did, it would be because it really only was in the 1990s that a film like The Addams Family could come into existence in the form we have it. The film lies at the confluence […]

The 1966 television special How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is a masterpiece at least three times over. First, it’s one of the greatest of all Christmas stories told in an audio-visual medium, filling its 26 minutes with exactly the correct amount of warm and fuzzy sentiment, wry cynicism to keep said sentiment in check, and […]

Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde presents a unique challenge to the filmmaking team that wants to adapt it for the big screen. It’s hugely well-known by the standards of 19th Century (i.e., public domain) genre fiction, so clearly not adapting it is no kind of option; […]

It seems to me that to make good, effective children’s horror must have one of the highest degrees of difficulty out there. You have to thread the tiniest of needles to find something that’s sufficiently terrifying and otherworldly on the one hand that it’s actually scary, the kind that worms its way into your bones; […]

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: the Walt Disney Company has acted for years like A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh is theirs and theirs alone, as is […]

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 […]

A review requested by Michael Matula, 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! Pink Floyd’s 1979 double album The Wall was accompanied by one of the most ridiculously complex tour […]

A review requested by Erin, 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 first thing likely to kill any modern performance of William Shakespeare’s plays is the line reading. This […]

Marjorie Prime is a wonderful example of a stage-to-screen adaptation. Director Michael Almereyda’s screenplay mostly leaves intact the material of Jordan Harrison’s 2014 play, a Pulitzer finalist. It largely takes place in a single location, and it leaves alone the distinctively stagey cadences of the dialogue. But it’s such a movie. Almereyda’s visual treatment of […]

A review requested by reader WBTN, with thanks for 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 1961 British film The Innocents – which is either a horror film about ghosts or a […]

The odds against horror movies adapted from the novels and short stories of Stephen King are not favorable; it might well be the case that only Carrie from 1976 and The Shining from 1980 (the first and third King adaptations of any kind) are so obviously, objectively good that you can get away calling them […]