reviewId int64 363k 588k | userId int64 33.9k 15.9M | itemId int64 1 1.42M | rating float64 1 10 | title stringlengths 1 10.9k ⌀ | content stringlengths 81 11.6k ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
442,840 | 819,382 | 167,404 | 4 | Sluggish supernatural mystery . | I realize this film had many good reviews . That's why I bought it . But it somehow managed to get by me without hooking me in . Its lack of impact had little to do with the acting , which is pretty good all around . Toni Collette is especially noteworthy . And Willis gives what is for him a subdued performance except ... |
443,572 | 819,382 | 39,101 | 4 | Melodrama lacks focus . | Ava Gardner returns from Chicago to her little home town of Ashburn . We're never made sure of the reasons . But she takes up with her old boy friend , George Raft , a semi-sot who seems to do nothing more than play nickle-and-dime poker and is supported by his doting mother . Raft is still in love with her evidently b... |
441,945 | 819,382 | 26,245 | 4 | Routine B Crimebuster . | It zips along quickly , like most B productions , with little wasted motion and no time spent on incidental events or reality intrusions . It's a British crime thriller starring Esmond Knight and Lilli Palmer and was made in 1935 , about the time Hitchcock was hitting his stride in the same arena . You can't help wonde... |
441,914 | 819,382 | 59,274 | 4 | Aimless Drama of British Stockade . | I saw this years ago and thought it was a little dull , then I saw it tonight and thought it was even duller . It's the story of a handful of disparate British soldiers in the African desert of World War II , sent to the stockade for one or another offense , and subject to demanding discipline , the chief example of wh... |
442,560 | 819,382 | 288,477 | 4 | Welcome to the SS Overlook Hotel . | Movies about deserted houses or communities are somehow enjoyable partly because of the milieu . As a kid I strolled around the deserted Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook , New Jersey , established before the Revolutionary War , a thriving city in itself during two World Wars , and then closed to the public except for a handf... |
442,816 | 819,382 | 120,461 | 4 | Volcano . About a volcano . | The modern wave of movies about collective disasters began , I think , in 1954 with " The High and the Mighty . " I've been trying to figure out how and why they managed to evolve ( or devolve ) into gargantuan productions involving masses of humanity and such monuments to civilization as the world's tallest skyscraper... |
441,913 | 819,382 | 41,761 | 4 | Your Treasury Department at Work . | This is a pretty routine crime drama involving narcotics in New York . The SS Florentine docks and unships a crate of medical dope but instead of dope there is nothing but sand in the crate . The purser has stolen it , with the complicity of one of the passengers , a Miss Toni Cardell . Two Treasury agents , Scott Brad... |
442,751 | 819,382 | 99,165 | 4 | Notes From the Underground | The point of Wolfe's original novel - - indeed the point of the whole story - - is that things take place because of a carefully calculated sense of expediency . The goal is survival within a particular kind of life style . The novel is full of malice . The only relationship that rings emotionally true is that between ... |
443,161 | 819,382 | 38,965 | 4 | Derivative mystery . | This was directed and co-written by Joseph Mankiewicz . The cast includes John Hodiak and Richard Conte . Almost all the scenes are shot at night around Los Angeles and on the lot . It ought to be good but in fact it's no more than routine . Let's recall John Huston's superb " The Maltese Falcon , " in which the hero ,... |
443,357 | 819,382 | 50,500 | 4 | modest sub movie | You have to feel sorry for anybody who tries to write the screenplay for a submarine movie . How is it possible to avoid all the established clichés ? The shattered chronometer , the bursting pipe , the ritual commands , the toy submarine nosing through the murk , the wounded skipper lying on the deck and ordering the ... |
442,479 | 819,382 | 427,392 | 4 | Highly infectious viral plot . | Don't show emotion , don't blink your eyes , walk like a zombie , and above all don't go to sleep - - or else you change into a simulacrum of your former self . Where have we heard this before ? Well , it was a story in Collier's Magazine in the early 1950s . It was made into a superior low-budget science fiction movie... |
442,399 | 819,382 | 52,611 | 4 | The Beast From One or Two Fathoms . | This is a brave and robust monster - - and it travels well too . It started off around 1950 as a Ray Bradbury story about a lonely sea monster who mistakes a lighthouse fog horn for the mating call of a possible mate . Then it became " The Beast From 20 , 000 Fathoms " , about an Apedosaurus who is released from his cr... |
442,980 | 819,382 | 212,304 | 4 | Ex Wife REALLY nails hubby . | Strikes me as routine , as far as TV movies go . I can believe that it's based on a true story because the plot seems too clumsy to have been written by anyone with storytelling skills . For instance , good old John Ritter ( now a rather bulky and bearded villain ) poisons his wife enough to make her ill , then accuses... |
441,753 | 819,382 | 352,248 | 4 | And a left - - and a right ! | I don't think the theme goes farther back than Lysistrata , about 400 BC . Women object to men's aficion for combat and try to stop it . This looks like a TV movie with higher production values and better actors . For forerunners of poor families drawn into boxing look for " Body and Soul " and " Rocky " . Yet , as a f... |
442,482 | 819,382 | 457,433 | 4 | Routine Mystery . | Halle Berry is a reporter whose best friend is murdered . She pursues the case over the objections of her editor , who finally fires her . ( If she were a cop , this would be the scene in which she hands over her gun and badge . ) With the help of a friend at the paper , Giovanni Ribisi , she goes undercover and is hir... |
443,218 | 819,382 | 32,283 | 4 | A War of Necessity | All the combatants seemed to sidle into the First World War crabwise , without really intending to do much other than preserve national pride , and then , before you know it , kaboom . Barbara Tuchman , who wrote the prize-winning history " Guns of August , " used to tell the story of a lecture she gave at a famous Mid... |
443,225 | 819,382 | 37,121 | 4 | Harmless Flag-Waver About Boot Camp . | A routine program filler with some familiar faces in the cast - - Rosco Karns , Robert Armstrong of " King Kong , " Horace McMahon in a walk-on . It's sort of a training film - - " What to Expect When You Join the Navy and What You Should Avoid Doing . " The opening narration tells us about the men in civilian clothes ... |
442,186 | 819,382 | 147,163 | 4 | Yet Another Serial Killer With a Theme | This one , David Keith , is an antiques vendor and schlepper who for some reason is killing 30-ish successful women by plastic-bagging them , then dressing them , grooming them , and posing them in the position of antique dolls . Kelly McGillis is an ex-medical student , a graduate in fact , who was Keith's first victi... |
443,263 | 819,382 | 50,249 | 4 | Unprepossessing Cops vs . Gangsters | There's nothing particularly original about this story of corrupt unions on one side and the " chief attorney " on the other . The stark but unimaginative lighting and photography stems from the fagged out noir cycle . The story could easily have been out of a Warner Brothers drawer with George Raft in the lead . The p... |
443,240 | 819,382 | 43,625 | 4 | Pedestrian . | Pretty decent cast - - John Garfield , Wallace Ford , Selena Royle - - but the film is no more than routine . Garfield is a gangster who has just committed a payroll robbery . On the run , he takes refuge in the working-class apartment of a girl he just met , Shelley Winters , and her family - - Mom , Pop , and kid bro... |
442,034 | 819,382 | 47,966 | 4 | Always remember you're a guest at the party . | Six GIs , about to be send home and discharged , get drunk and sneak into a cult meeting in Asia . Surrounded by hooded figures , two male dancers pretend to have a fight . Behind them , on an altar , a woven basket opens and a figure painted emerges and begins imitating a snake , finally biting one of the dancers on t... |
442,909 | 819,382 | 54,614 | 4 | Torpid Modernization of Othello . | I kind of looked forward to this - - Patrick McGoohan , Charlie Mingus , Dave Brubeck , Billy Shakespeare . How could it go wrong ? But it's pretty slow and ultimately unbelievable . When I see a band manager being taunted by a drummer , McGoohan , and becoming enraged while stoned , instead of flinging himself on the ... |
442,087 | 819,382 | 424,600 | 4 | Another Bloated Remake . | I don't know why anyone would take a reasonably decent movie like " The Andromeda Strain " from the 1970s and mess with it . Until the last few minutes , the original was like a clearly written technical manual in which a team of scientists tries to solve the puzzle of a lethal organism captured in space and brought to... |
442,040 | 819,382 | 50,294 | 4 | Big Bug Formula Soldiers On | Something strange is happening in remote areas of the Arctic . An Air Force weather station is found wrecked , its occupants missing . An Eskimo village is destroyed . A fishing vessel disappears . Curious spoors are found in the snow . A four-foot piece of a living organism is found near a destroyed airplane . The pie... |
441,757 | 819,382 | 120,696 | 4 | Rain City | There's a certain novelty value in the sight of three jet skis chasing one another up and down the flooded hallways of an abandoned high school during a flood at night . And that's about it . We have thieves led by Morgan Freeman trying to find the money in a small inundated Indiana town that was removed from a strande... |
442,320 | 819,382 | 89,757 | 4 | Read a book or something . . . | What could be an interesting story about a madman and the police in pursuit of him is turned into a soap-opera tragedy of the week punctuated by a few anonymous shots fired from a pistol in close up . We learn an awful lot about Detective Ed Zigo's tribulations , mainly centering about his wife's terminal illness , and... |
443,140 | 819,382 | 58,947 | 4 | Tepid WWII Drama . | The years between " The Guns of Navaronne " and " Patton " saw the release of a number of World War II epics and would-be epics , some good and some , like " Anzio " , pathetic . " The Battle of the Bulge " is about in the middle , with nothing much to recommend it and no outrageous flaws . I hated to click on the " Co... |
442,494 | 819,382 | 41,615 | 4 | Emma Bovary : Sensation Type . | Carl Jung , the Swiss psychologist , posited four types of personalities : the sensation type , the feeling type , the thinking type , and the intuitive type . Now , your typical sensation type ( lecturer points to portrait of Madame Bovary ) lives for the moment , switches allegiances on impulse , luxuriates in the in... |
442,357 | 819,382 | 116,253 | 4 | Man Was Never Meant to Fly . | David Suchet and his Arabic-speaking goons hijack a 747 with the intention of exploding a bomb filled with nerve gas over Washington and wiping out the eastern seaboard . The hijackers demand the release of an Arab prisoner of indeterminate national origin . Washington is worried . They need not be . Not with Steven Se... |
443,154 | 819,382 | 112,896 | 4 | Dx : Anemia . | Mel Brooks has brought out a couple of outrageously funny movies , and Leslie Nielson has starred in his own series , but this one measures up to neither standard , alas . One of the problems is that the original " Dracula " with Bela Lugosi was so perfect in its thingness that , after only a few viewings , it's practi... |
442,576 | 819,382 | 199,920 | 4 | Pitfalls of Celebrity | An allegation of aggravated sexual assault along with some other unpleasant peccadilloes , including improper use of a broom , are made against half a dozen or so of the most popular high-school jocks in Glen Ridge , New Jersey , by a " mildly retarded " student ( Heather Matarazzo ) . The investigation and building of... |
442,943 | 819,382 | 210,719 | 4 | Isn't it time to give up ? | I hate to do this but how can one NOT compare the several Gatsby films to the novel on which they're based ? The book has three outstanding features : ( 1 ) A somewhat disjointed narrative in which Gatsby is a man of mystery until half-way through , and then POW . It's like Hitchcock killing off Marian Crane in the mid... |
442,008 | 819,382 | 406,816 | 4 | The perfect stereotype ? | I wish I knew what to make of a movie like this . It seems to be divided into two parts - - action sequences and personal dramas ashore . It follows Ashton Kutsher through survival swimmer school , guided by Master Chief Kevin Costner , then to Alaska where a couple of spectacular rescues take place , the last resultin... |
443,152 | 819,382 | 41,253 | 4 | Second-Hand Stuff . | Raoul Walsh does his usual yeoman-like job of directing this mediocre Western with Joel McRae as an outlaw trying to make one last big haul by robbing a train , Dorothy Malone as the young woman he thinks he loves , and Virginia Mayo as the girl who is , as he finally realizes , made for him . Walsh also directed the o... |
441,893 | 819,382 | 315,297 | 4 | Red Herrings in the Fog . | In some ways the best touch in this movie , efficiently directed by Philip Kaufman , comes at the climax . ( Caution : spoilers ahead ) Ashley Judd as the chief suspect is a serial murder case is forced to watch her avuncular mentor , Samuel Jackson , blow his brains out at the end of a foggy San Francisco pier and flo... |
443,198 | 819,382 | 461,872 | 4 | Aping a success . | Traffic was a well done film , clear in its ambiguity , and ending with a small and ironic victory after a string of defeats . There were few heavies - - most people were in the grip of self interest . Less effort went into this production . I missed most of the first part but the texture of the flick is apparent fro... |
442,795 | 819,382 | 366,627 | 4 | Good Cast , Hobbled by Poor Script . | Nice cast , all of whom have done interesting work elsewhere . It's good to see Kris Kristofferson still working after all these years . He's stretched his skills to encompass heavies and here , darkly bearded and wrinkled , he fits the role of the Medical Director , half sadistic , half bedside manner . Jennifer Jason... |
443,610 | 819,382 | 111,257 | 4 | Movie Culture | It's always interesting to look at movies through history as if they were all part of the same overall culture , drawing on similar behavioral conventions and technologies . Like living cultures , movies have a historical context , undergo innovations , evolve over time to reflect changing folkways , and so forth . Spe... |
443,201 | 819,382 | 373,450 | 4 | Weak murder mystery . | It starts off alright , as a kind of " Goodfellas " dealing with a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis team in the 1950s . Kevin Bacon's narration , both matter-of-fact and kinda surprised , carries the viewer along in exposing the corrupt underbelly of the Martin-Lewis bonhomie . But the problems crop up rather quickly . What... |
442,805 | 819,382 | 102,614 | 4 | See Brooklyn and Die . | A cop's partner is killed for no apparent reason , giving the cop a revenge motive . He searches for the killer around his Brooklyn neighborhood , beating the crap out of anyone who gets in his way , and running into a couple of cute babes and elderly capos along the way . There is an outrageous shootout at the end , w... |
442,105 | 819,382 | 107,420 | 4 | Routine Mystery | What an uninteresting hodge-podge . It could have been something more but no imagination seems to have gone into the script or the direction . A man is framed for murder by his wife and her lover . The conspirators do a pretty thorough job of making him look guilty . But the man ( Richard Thomas ) , whose psychiatric r... |
442,051 | 819,382 | 35,489 | 4 | Lycanthropy is a real disease ! | It's hard to imagine that this was a product of 20th-Century Fox because it looks so much like a B feature from Universal Studios - - the isolated mansion , the absence of daylight , the ground-covering fog , the spooky music , the family haunted by a curse , the dark figures slinking through the shadows , and most of ... |
442,979 | 819,382 | 328,031 | 4 | Pointless Gore Fest . | I don't know anything of the writer's or the director's earlier work so I hadn't brought any prejudices to the film . Based on the brief description of the plot in TV Guide I thought it might be interesting . But implausibility was piled upon implausibility . Each turn of the plot seemed to be an excuse to drag in more... |
441,897 | 819,382 | 71,817 | 4 | Inferior Remake - - Another One . | What's the point ? Why do they do it ? The original " The Mark of Zorro " was not exactly a cinematic classic but it was rousing fun with everyone hamming it up . Well , this is not a shot-for-shot remake , but it uses the same score and lifts some of the dialog from the original . Why ? I guess another nickel might be... |
443,346 | 819,382 | 115,862 | 4 | Mediocrity . | If the title , " The Chamber " , is meant to be a pun , it's a pretty good one . There's the judge's " chamber " where decisions are made , and , at the other end , the gas " chamber " where those plans are executed along with the inmate to whom those judgments were passed down . In some ways , the title is the nifties... |
442,294 | 819,382 | 115,857 | 4 | The very definition of routine . | The frozen landscapes are impressive . Ice-covered lakes , stark bare tree trunks that look black against the snow . It gets so cold that at night you hear trees crack when their sap freezes . In upstate New York , I used to stare out the windows during dull lectures and wonder how the Iroquois could have survived wint... |
443,571 | 819,382 | 109,198 | 4 | You have already seen it . | Madeleine Stowe , as Cody Zamora , is a hooker who shoots a man in self defense . Being what she is , that is to say , not being Mother Teresa , she doesn't generate much sympathy in this rough-riding town and the good citizens decide to hang her . " Get on with it , " she tells them with defiant contempt . They're abo... |
442,641 | 819,382 | 37,746 | 4 | Now You're a Good Jap . . . . | I saw this movie on TV as a kid and enjoyed it thoroughly - - Flying Tigers ! I saw it again on TV tonight for the second time , and found it to be a howler from beginning to end . It's easy enough to find effective , cheaply made flag-waving propaganda movies made during the war years that have redeeming qualities , p... |
442,988 | 819,382 | 371,257 | 4 | Occurrence at East River Bridge | In Ambrose Bierce's story , " The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge , " a man with a noose around his neck is pushed off the bridge for execution . The rope breaks and the man escapes . He laboriously makes his way home before feeling a great pain in his neck and dying . The whole thing was a dream between his stepping of... |
441,918 | 819,382 | 43,131 | 4 | Concussed , Confused Mitchum Stumbles Through Dullish Crime Drama | I understand that the director , John Farrow , has done some admirable work and that Mitchum is a noir icon when he has a trench coat on , but both the director and the actor are undone by a poor script here . Briefly , Mitchum is a doctor in San Francisco who falls in love with a suicidal patient , Faith Domergue . Sh... |
441,963 | 819,382 | 39,748 | 4 | Routine Crime Melodrama | John Ireland plays Duke , a thief who dumps his wounded partner , sets up a frame for an innocent young man , then goes around knocking off people who are wise to what's going on or who have money he wants or who otherwise crimp his cool , manipulative style . At the end he is caught and killed in a shootout with the g... |
443,015 | 819,382 | 102,870 | 4 | Average TV Fare | The murder of a lawyer's wife takes second place in importance to the impact of gossip on members of the small town . By gossip , I mean the exchange of supposedly confidential information about persons and their relationships . It's a better research problem than murder because we can all understand why someone might ... |
442,774 | 819,382 | 94,669 | 4 | Etiolated | This is the fifth in the recent series of Agatha Christie mysteries to have shown up on film , and it is the least of them . It has the usual all-star cast , though perhaps not as starry as the earlier ones , but it is , ultimately , kind of boring . The best of the series are the two earliest - - " Murder on the Orien... |
442,961 | 819,382 | 119,468 | 4 | You've already seen it . | The niece of a Washington , D . C . , police psychologist disappears from her campus in North Carolina . The psychologist ( Freeman ) goes down to help out the local cops . Shortly , another young woman ( Judd ) , an intern at the local Regional Center is likewise kidnapped . We follow her story as she is taken to an u... |
442,520 | 819,382 | 51,522 | 4 | Exceptionally Typical Western . | Fred MacMurray is the judge in a small Western town . A man named Rudy Hayes ( Christopher Dark ) has killed a farmer and been found guilty by a jury of his peers , although it's hard to imagine a peer of this unkempt miscreant . The whole town wants to see this guy hanged and MacMurray has already decided that that is... |
442,579 | 819,382 | 22,854 | 4 | Sentimental and Routine . | I must have missed something here because the movie seems to have found so many receptive viewers , but it's necessary to call them as I see them . And this one is a ball , wide and outside . The tale puts Marie Dressler in the role of Mammy in " Gone With the Wind , " except that Mammy , or Emma , in this case being C... |
441,957 | 819,382 | 139,809 | 4 | Paper or Plastic ? | I have to admit that this one got beyond me from time to time so these are just some impressionistic shards . It's about a software engineer ( Craig Bierko ) whose boss ( Armin Mueller-Stahl ) is murdered , sliced to pieces in fact , one night in Los Angeles . The police come to suspect him . Bierko feels that the clue... |
442,066 | 819,382 | 100,114 | 4 | Macho Man | Have you ever wondered why these guys - - Seagal , Stallone , Willis , et al - - manage to survive all those gunfights in which they're outnumbered ? I think I've got it figured out . The enemies always miss , and the hero doesn't . Here , Seagal has a pistol and outshoots a half dozen heavies firing at him from a few ... |
443,338 | 819,382 | 74,899 | 4 | Awful | There's no need to go on about this prototypical piece of chauvinistic rubbish except to say that it's an insult to the brave people involved in the battle . Every subtlety is deleted . Every American error glossed over . Obtrusive subplots detract from the essential story . The editing is a mish mash of model work , a... |
441,991 | 819,382 | 385,307 | 4 | Light-hearted sequel . | I can't compare it to the original , which I didn't see , but this good-natured but slightly desperate film has " sequel " written all over it . It is a mixed bag . There is the mismatched cop buddy theme , involving Sandra Bullock's antisocial and physically aggressive black partner who punches people and knocks them ... |
443,320 | 819,382 | 174,931 | 4 | Don't Do It , Lola ! | The cover of the DVD has a photo of Lola ( Anna Ammarati ) on her bicycle , laughing over her shoulder at the camera , her skirt hiked up to her waist and revealing her panty-covered behind . The movie opens with this scene . Lola bicycles around town with her filmy skirt up around her neck , turning all the men on , i... |
443,471 | 819,382 | 55,539 | 4 | Courtroom drama lacks focus . | I don't know what the novel was like but it was probably tighter than the script for this movie . I'll have to lay out the plot , which is essentially this : four American GIs stationed in Germany rape a teen aged German girl ( Christine Kaufmann ) . They are charged and court martialed , defended by Kirk Douglas and p... |
442,069 | 819,382 | 64,148 | 4 | Peck's Not a Bad Boy | Gregory Peck does a reasonably good job as a Nobelist who is sent to China to steal an enzyme that will increase the world's food supply . The Chinese , you see , want to keep it a secret and use it themselves . ( They've since given up hoping for miracles and have turned to a much more sensible one-child per family po... |
442,947 | 819,382 | 373,926 | 4 | Splendidly dull . | I've usually admired Sidney Pollack's work as a direct ( and actor ) and he's pretty good here in both roles . The direction is just about flawless - - not too much stylization , but just enough . The photography is crisp and colorful when it needs to be and the darkness is properly ominous . The location shooting capt... |
443,159 | 819,382 | 42,982 | 4 | All These Girls Need is a Little Discipline . | An idealistic doctor , Paul Henreid , is a counselor or something at a new prison for naughty young girls . No walls , but humane treatment - - that sort of thing . The fly in the ointment is the headmistress or foreman or whatever she is , the top sergeant , who runs the place on a day-to-day basis . And what an old-f... |
443,043 | 819,382 | 75,005 | 4 | A commercial bullseye . | The Exorcist made an awful lot of money , so it was inevitable that there follow a spate of supernatural thrillers . This is one of the first , itself to be followed by I forget how many sequels and imitations . Suspenseful , gory , and thoroughly commercial , this slice of machine-processed turkey baloney was notabl... |
442,723 | 819,382 | 51,706 | 4 | Routine period mystery / thriller . | The Haunted Strangler has been compared to " Dr . Jeykll and Mr . Hyde " and to the Val Lewton horror productions at RKO , and it's easy to see why . Boris Karloff is Rankin , a novelist with a devoted wife and loving step-daughter . Twenty years after the hanging of the notorious Strangler , Rankin develops a theory... |
443,265 | 819,382 | 82,862 | 4 | A tough row to hoe . | To tell the truth , Shakespeare isn't really easy to follow , what with his tangled syntax , his poetry , his puns , his arcane lexicon . But Anthony Hopkins , I think , did a splendid job . I managed to buy this one by mistake , through clumsiness , and it just isn't the same . The actors don't seem to speak slowly en... |
442,653 | 819,382 | 104,265 | 4 | Confusing story of murder , insanity , and assorted mishigas . | Kind of disappointing considering the cast - - Richard Gere as the morally upright but slightly imprudent psychiatrist , Uma Thurman as his " caterpillar " patient , and Kim Basinger as Thurman's seductive older sister . To help him understand Thurman's problems , Gere seeks out Basinger and winds up making furious lov... |
441,979 | 819,382 | 106,453 | 4 | Fun and Games With Madonna and Willem . | Madonna is married to a very rich older man with a heart condition . He dies , leaving her eight million dollars . The circumstances are suspicious . He's had a heart problem for years , there is cocaine in his nasal spray , and he's been handcuffed to the bed while Madonna has been doing him . Did she marry him and de... |
443,228 | 819,382 | 209,013 | 4 | Not the Best Example . | I'll keep this short . Martin Ritt's " Norma Rae " was a more original , less stereotyped study of exploited Appalachian workers and their tribulations , and so was Barbara Koppel's documentary of this confrontation between union organizers and the evil company they labor for . The acting isn't bad . Holly Hunter is go... |
441,754 | 819,382 | 44,789 | 4 | Would you buy a used car from these men ? | Preston Foster as the cop who wants his reputation and his job back is human enough , but as for the rest - - what a line-up of heavies . Neville Brand going chubby and coarse . Jack Elam of the chameleon eyes . And Lee Van Cleef , New Jersey's contribution to heavydom , along with Bruno Richard Hauptmann . And there's... |
443,349 | 819,382 | 52,545 | 5 | Hope as Insurance Salesman Out West . | I think the kids might enjoy this more than adults . The situations are amusing - - imagine Bob Hope as Jesse James ' bodyguard in Missouri - - but they're kind of slow , a little drawn out , funny in a sitcom way . The punch lines are followed by rather long silences while the audience is supposed to be laughing . The... |
442,400 | 819,382 | 41,831 | 5 | Slight Ealing Comedy . | Donald Houston and Meredith Edwards are two Welsh miners who win a trip to London and two-hundred pounds . They are to be met at Paddington Station by a reporter ( Alec Guiness ) who will be their guide . They miss Guiness , then they lose each other in the streets . Houston picks up a young woman with designs on the p... |
442,109 | 819,382 | 45,669 | 5 | So Long at the Boat Deck | I guess by 1953 Jeanne Crain's career was sputtering out . She wasn't much of an actress although evidently a sweet lady , and she gave an unimpeachable performance earlier in " Leave Her to Heaven " as the virginal " gal with the hoe . " Her performance here is adequate and no more than that . She's beautiful and has ... |
442,374 | 819,382 | 1,100,911 | 5 | Average True-Crime Story of Serial Murderer . | The so-called Green River killer was responsible for more than three dozen deaths of women , mostly prostitutes , in the Seattle / Tacoma area of Washington state . This lengthy , slow , dark film isn't really his story . It follows the career of Dave Reichert ( Thomas Cavanaugh ) , the head of the Green River task for... |
442,023 | 819,382 | 47,844 | 5 | Half Past High Noon . | Fred MacMurray is a peaceful shopkeeper who kills one of the Dennis gang with a lucky shot . The rest escape . MacMurray becomes a hero throughout the state of Texas . The remaining five members of the gang determine to kill him . The other town residents know it and begin to avoid MacMurray . They offer to stake him t... |
442,347 | 819,382 | 61,204 | 5 | Farce is full of effort . | Its a story of two older cousins - - John Mills and Ralph Richardson - - the surviving one of which pair will inherit a fortune , and the fortune will of course be passed on to his younger relatives . The two cousins haven't spoken in forty years . One of them , Mills , is an angry , sickly fellow . Richardson is an ol... |
442,589 | 819,382 | 382,628 | 5 | Murkey waters , rather . | Well , it's a Schreckfest alright , and sometimes an effective one . Lots of eerie scenes . A dead body or two but no bloodshed . The atmosphere is terrific . The photography and production design deserve credit . And the players are uniformly professional . Pete Postlethwaite's face seems made up of lumps of play-do .... |
442,821 | 819,382 | 99,091 | 5 | Strangers on a Pier . | I don't know . The first time I saw this , years ago , I thought it was pretty exciting but it hasn't held up well on a second viewing . It's essentially the story of Yuppie James Spader who meets the charming , but vicious and clever Rob Lowe , and is led astray by him . An office rival of Spader's plays a computer tr... |
442,194 | 819,382 | 97,662 | 5 | Fatal Femme | Joanne Whaley is a deceitful slut in this complicated neonoir thriller , and Val Kilmer is the private eye she manages to suck into her scheme to steal money from Michael Madsen who has just stolen it from the Mafia . There are multiple murders along the way . In the end everybody gets dead except for Kilmer who makes ... |
443,175 | 819,382 | 33,149 | 5 | Lupino's picture . | A pretty good Warner Brothers working-man flick , recycled though it is , that makes you feel for the poor guys driving those big rigs and trying to squeeze in as many hours on the road as possible . But that's only part of the plot . The main story has the slightly mad Ida Lupino , married to the boss , the good-natur... |
443,308 | 819,382 | 881,934 | 5 | It Could Have Been Worse . | This could easily have been turned into an exploitation flick , the kind that's so easy to visualize among today's profusion of junk . See , there would be a John Lennon look-alike with a phony Liverpudlian accent , and half the film would follow him around on his last day on earth . Then there would be a Mark David Ch... |
443,002 | 819,382 | 268,695 | 5 | Flashy story based on Wells ' Novel | The 1960 version by George Pal has stop-motion effects that seem dated now , especially compared to the dazzling images we see on the screen here , and yet I kind of prefer the earlier version . It was dated , pedantic , and simple - - or simple minded , if you like . But that very simplicity made it easier to follow t... |
442,721 | 819,382 | 28,231 | 5 | Undistinguished but enjoyable thriller . | Hitchcock was professionally competent in directing this , but not yet the tantalizing genius he was to become with maturity . John Gielgud , Madeleine Carrol , and Peter Lorre are sent to Switzerland to eradicate an unknown German spy who is about to buy Arabia during World War I . First , Lorre offs the wrong man , s... |
441,960 | 819,382 | 41,968 | 5 | Taut Little Melodrama . | Sensible but dull husband Arther Kennedy and domineering demanding wife Lizabeth Scott are driving through the California night to a party in their convertible . She doesn't want to go , although they've promised to show up , and she nags him until he turns around and heads back to L . A . A car passes them in the oppo... |
442,091 | 819,382 | 41,983 | 5 | No-Nonsense Crime Drama . | Lloyd Bridges had a face made for the camera , full of smooth , bony planes , a clean forehead , all dominated by a couple of deep-set eyes that seemed to glimmer in the shadows of his brows . And he had , throughout his career , the quick , nervous energy of a small predator , maybe a ferret . Even in the ripeness of ... |
443,317 | 819,382 | 41,958 | 5 | Proletarian Noir . | I understand Jules Dassin was more or less driven to work in Europe by the HUAC investigations . If he was a Commie you'd never be able to tell from this film , which fits right smack into the frame established by the Warner Brothers ' working-class films of the 1930s - - " Manpower , " " Tiger Shark , " " They Drive B... |
442,205 | 819,382 | 38,937 | 5 | Only a Mild Shock | Vincent Price , at a time when his career in expensive features was beginning to slide , is a psychiatrist who murders his wife for the love of another woman , Lynn Bari . Price carts the body off in a trunk and dumps it on the rocks to simulate an accident . But the murder has been witnessed by a woman across the cour... |
442,958 | 819,382 | 35,114 | 5 | Okay , who's the canary ? | This is a minor motion picture . MGM has put together a fairly simple story of a good German-American who takes the place of his evil twin , who is the German Counsel and runs a spy ring . The good German ( Conrad Veidt ) worms his way into the nest of evildoers , exposes all of them , is betrayed by a pet canary , and... |
442,554 | 819,382 | 26,121 | 5 | Being rich is better . | Rather standard working-class drama of the sort that Warner Brothers was turning out , though with more emphasis on the issue of unions and union-breaking than was usual . The usual stalwart support is present , such as Ward Bond and even Akim Tamirov . Maybe part of the reason it doesn't have more impact on viewers th... |
442,362 | 819,382 | 120,338 | 5 | Expensive wreck . | I've always enjoyed the British version , " A Night to Remember , " based on Walter Lord's popular book . Yes , it's black and white , and a bit dated , but it's a straightforward telling of an awesome disaster . The 1953 Hollywood version was a boring soap opera which was set aboard the Titanic simply so that some exc... |
443,432 | 819,382 | 85,678 | 5 | Harmless , old-fashioned comic adventure . | I'm not sure why Tom Selleck's career as a leading man stalled when it did . I'm told he's handsome . And he has that cracked Jimmy-Stewart voice . In interviews he seems bright and articulate . He doesn't do a bang-up job in this light-hearted zap number but who could ? All he's called upon to do is act drunk once in ... |
442,300 | 819,382 | 106,912 | 5 | Unassuming UFO Abduction Flick . | In 1975 five guys were driving through the desolate forests of Arizona and one of them seems to have been killed or kidnapped by a giant pulsing orange UFO . The others take off and return in a hurry to town and don't report the incident . When they finally do , everyone else in the little community of Snowflake thinks... |
442,470 | 819,382 | 47,679 | 5 | Why Won't They Believe Me ! | Stanwyck is a painter who spots a murder taking place across the courtyard of her high rise . The murderer is the suave George Sanders , a distinguished historian and author . She calls the police , in the person of Gary Merrill , but do you think Merrill and his boys believe her ? Not for a moment . They go so far as ... |
441,625 | 819,382 | 106,918 | 5 | Nice performances , clotted plot | You really can't fault any of the performers here . Tom Cruise has a boyish high-school handsomeness and an unthinkingly naive demeanor to go with it . Jeanne Triplehorn has big dark soulful eyes and does and says what she's supposed to . But the lesser actors are the more interesting . And they are here in droves . Ge... |
443,410 | 819,382 | 28,358 | 5 | The universe or nothing . Which will it be ? | The fantasy about the evolution of Western Civilization over the course of several generations , beginning in 1936 . England seems to be at peace . Then , out of nowhere , a ruinous war that wrecks everything , followed by an epidemic that , like the Black Death , winnows the population . As the disease dissipates , we... |
442,083 | 819,382 | 38,988 | 5 | Pedestrian Romantic Melodrama | When the film was released , the adverts referred to it as " The Strange Love of ( whisper her name ) Martha Ivers . " That gives you a pretty good indication of the target audience - - snoops and gossips . Actually , the movie is rather better than that , but not that much better . Sam Masterson ( Van Heflin ) returns... |
443,575 | 819,382 | 23,955 | 5 | Too much caster oil . | John Ford and Will Rogers made three movies together in the mid 1930s . " Steamboat Round the Bend " is a broad comedy dealing with what Joseph Campbell called " creative mythology " - - the need to overthrow old myths in favor of more recent ones . " Judge Priest " showed Will Rogers as an easygoing magistrate with a ... |
442,977 | 819,382 | 116,508 | 5 | Kind of complicated , atmospheric crime thriller . | Nice shots of the bayou under the opening credits . Unspoiled rivers , pristine swamps , oaks draped with Spanish moss . It all looks rather promising . I guess you can still find such subtle but majestic littorals , maybe along route 90 around Houma , but from most highways in southern Lousiana all you see is oily swa... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.