Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

At Alternate Ending, we value your readership; we also value your time. We’ve done the work of discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time, so you don’t have to; therefore, we’ve come up with a rating system that reflects the world we live in, where you can’t always go see everything you might want to.

The first part of the system grades a movie’s Quality, on a five-star scale. This is where we’re wearing our critics’ hats, and we’re trying to let you know how good we thought a film was: how well-made, how emotionally powerful, how entertaining, how engaged we were by the story.

A must-see for anybody who cares about movies

Extremely good, and we’d definitely prod you to go see it

It’s okay. If it sounds interesting to you, it’s not worth avoiding

It’s worth avoiding. Mediocre or even actively bad

Run away as fast as you can

 

But how great a film is doesn’t tell the whole story. Sometimes you have to make hard choices about where to spend your time and money, and that’s where we try to let you know about whether the movie gives you Bang for Your Buck: is it worth seeing in the theater, or can you wait for streaming and DVD? Plan an evening around it, or put it on in the background while you’re washing dishes?

Worth every penny to see it ASAP on the biggest screen you can find

A big enough spectacle that you’ll regret not seeing it in the theaters

At least worth $5 Tuesday, or definitely pay to stream it when you can

Wait to catch it for free on Netflix or Amazon Prime: it’ll hold up fine on TV

They should pay you, this is as much fun as a magazine article on the same topic

Better still, both of these ratings will be provided by all three of us on every movie we see. Because we’re all just people, and we all have our biases and weak spots. By not imposing one single viewpoint on these films, we hope to provide a broader range of opinions, and hopefully make this more useful for you, our readers.