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441,809 | 819,382 | 29,971 | 7 | Plot Ridiculous , Fred and Ginger Splendid . | By the time of this release , 1938 , the studio was having trouble finding fresh stories for the dancing duo . They'd just tried putting Fred and Ginger into swabby uniforms in " Follow the Fleet . " Here , Fred is back in his tux and Ginger in her ballroom gowns . The usual plot is reversed . Instead of his pursuing h... |
442,048 | 819,382 | 392,952 | 7 | The Fatal Glass of Beer . | This is one of Dame Agatha's more engaging conundrums , though not exactly the kind of acute examination of " the psychology " that Hercule Poirot ( David Suchet ) claims it is . Let's see . There is one of those perfervid painter-types , Amyas Crale , a Byronic figure , married to a good-enough wife but having one aff... |
442,732 | 819,382 | 78,841 | 7 | Amusing Fantasy . | Let me begin by quoting Ben himself . ' I have no use for people on welfare but if I am to be perfectly honest with myself , they probably have no use for me . ' Jack Warden , as the President of the United States , is giving this eulogy at the funeral of his criminally rich old conservative friend , Melvin Douglas .... |
443,284 | 819,382 | 35,608 | 7 | The Cruel Sea | It's hard to dislike the Warner Brothers ' war movies of the 1940s despite any weaknesses they might have had . They are inexpensive , unpretentious , and exciting . And , like most Warner Brothers flicks , they're oriented towards a working-class audience . No fancy philosophizing , no pop psych profundities , no onto... |
442,833 | 819,382 | 82,970 | 7 | Pride goeth before a fall . | Very neat production that captures the essence of New York City and its upper-middle-class suburbs in the early years of the 20th century . The performances are uniformly good . On the first viewing , Jimmy Cagney disappoints . We are , after all , used to seeing him as a bouncing semi-psychotic , even in his last film... |
442,566 | 819,382 | 54,790 | 7 | We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us . | It has a lot more in the way of special effects than " On the Beach , " released the year before , but the special effects look pretty cheesy by today's standards . Not that it matters much because there are so many of them - - tornadoes , heat , floods , mists , the most severe droughts . That's what can happen when y... |
442,927 | 819,382 | 171,580 | 7 | Winning romantic comedy and fantasy . | Renee Zellweger is a Kansas housewife whose domineering husband is mixed up in drug trafficking . Two professional hit men - - Morgan Freeman and his son , Chris Rock , murder the husband in his dining room . Zellweger , unobserved by the killers , witnesses this and undergoes a dissociative reaction , assuming the per... |
442,745 | 819,382 | 104,549 | 7 | Decent , complicated thriller | It's a long and complex movie . Complex not because there are too many subplots . ( There are only two interwoven plots : the solution of the mystery and the mating of Andy Garcia and Uma Thurman . ) It's just that we follow events in considerable detail . That's okay , in itself , but the climax itself - - the revelat... |
443,440 | 819,382 | 53,183 | 7 | Non-stop action on a dusty Korean hill . | This , despite its weaknesses , is quite a good movie . There is little sentimentality and no romance . It's all dust and death on both sides , the dwindling American force commanded by Gregory Peck and the Communist Chinese enemy . It's based on S . L . A . Marshall's book of the same name , which focused , as does th... |
442,330 | 819,382 | 35,703 | 7 | Warm , Diverting Musical . | Little Joe ( Eddie " Rochester " Anderson ) is a warehouseman in a small African-American town , married to Petunia ( Ethel Waters ) , who falls ill and dreams the Lord and the Devil are testing him by allowing him to win the Irish Sweepstakes and sending him a tempting visitor in the form and person ( what form , what... |
442,222 | 819,382 | 76,299 | 7 | New Wave . | I remember seeing this when it was released , in a theater in Palo Alto , and not expecting much . I mean - - an Australian movie ? But it finally got to me . Here's a scene . Richard Chamberlain is sitting cross legged on the floor of a shabby apartment in Sidney , facing an Australian aborigine elder named Charlie . ... |
442,890 | 819,382 | 35,664 | 7 | Simple but effective genre movie | Actually it's a kind of remake of John Ford's " Lost Patrol " only this time in the jungles of the Bataan peninsula . A mixed group of men with varied background are pinned down by the enemy and picked off one by one in colorful ways . Characters and incidents are out of a comic book . This is not a subtle movie . If y... |
442,297 | 819,382 | 54,847 | 7 | A very gentil parfait knight . | Not a bad historical epic at all , kind of stirring . Charlton Heston is Roderigo Diaz de Vivar , who comes to be known as El Cyd , an honorific derived from Arabic which is still with us in the form of the name " Said " . He's inaccurately introduced as " a simple man . " In reality , while not necessarily smart , he'... |
442,561 | 819,382 | 360,009 | 7 | I'm going to get you out of here . You're going to get me out of here ? I'm going to get you out of here . | I started watching this without knowing any of the credits . As the dialog and the anfractuous plot developed I found myself thinking , " Oh , no ! " It was all so MAMET-LIKE . I assumed that David Mamet had had sufficient critical successes and box office winners that other writers and directors were shamelessly rippi... |
442,801 | 819,382 | 488,120 | 7 | Tricky Mystery | Nicely done , stylish puzzler about a man who murders his wife . Anthony Hopkins discovers that his wife , Embeth Davidtz , is having one of those anonymous affairs with Billy Burke , who happens to be a detective in LA homicide . One night she comes home from an assignation and Hopkins coolly shoots her in the head . ... |
441,982 | 819,382 | 71,847 | 7 | What we escaped from . | This isn't going to be everybody's favorite movie . The production values don't shoot out the lights . All the sets are indoors . There's no motion to speak of . The whole shebang seems static and talky . Yet it's an important document and in some ways well done . If much of the dialog sounds stilted it's because it wa... |
443,295 | 819,382 | 37,638 | 7 | Life's a city , full of strange streets . . . . . | SPOILERS . I'll pretty much collapse any description of the story because anybody who has sat through this , or is willing to sit through it , or in an Edgar G . ( for " George " ) Ulmer freak , already knows it . Tom Neal and his blonde girl friend work in a New York nightclub . He plays the piano . She sings . He's n... |
442,154 | 819,382 | 642,284 | 7 | Mrs . De Groot : | Once the show hit its stride , all of the episodes generated their shares of untrammeled laughter and by the third season , things were swinging along easily . It's almost impossible to imagine how the writers could so consistently have come up with absurd situations and barbed exchanges . Neil Simon's joints would hav... |
442,486 | 819,382 | 47,573 | 7 | Boy , What a Big BUG ! | One of the earliest and one of the best " big bug " movies to appear in the 1950s . There are these giant ants - - and I mean BIG ones - - that were caused by the first atomic bomb explosion in New Mexico . " Where was the first bomb exploded ? " , asks Edmund Gwen , the requisite scientist . " Near here , in the White... |
442,262 | 819,382 | 26,029 | 7 | A Fine Example of Early Hitch . | What a craftsmanlike job Hitchcock did on this one . It belongs to his chase / thriller category but it's neatly plumped out by comedic and serious dramatic interludes . It may seem strictly an entertainment , but that episode involving the dour Scottish farmer and his lonely , compassionate wife is like a little short... |
442,241 | 819,382 | 87,244 | 7 | Reasonably Doubtful ? | If you read Joe McGinnes ' book , you'd find it difficult to accuse the author of trying to sell more copies of it by twisting facts around . McGinnis was hired in the first place by MacDonald to tell his side of the story and only gradually did the writer change his mind about MacDonald's innocence . Of course McGinni... |
442,563 | 819,382 | 31,867 | 7 | Good Warner's Gangster Movie . | This was directed by Raoul Walsh and included many of the Warner Brothers stalwarts . You'll recognize many familiar faces if you're an aficionado of the genre . Rip-roaring , no-nonsense stuff , it's basically organized around three stories : ( 1 ) Cagney's rise from unemployed ex-soldier to the top of the bootlegger ... |
443,303 | 819,382 | 516,830 | 7 | About as good as they get . | This is the one about big business and wine tasting . The heavies are making a good deal of money by selling certain stocks short , then murdering the chairmen in such a way that it looks like a heart attack . With the chairmen dead , the price of the stocks falls , and the pounds roll in . The trick is to get selected... |
442,802 | 819,382 | 71,935 | 7 | Fine , Suspenseful Drama . | If you were to take Agatha Christie and put her on a lot of testosterone you might come up with something like Frederick Forsyth . They have a lot in common . Their stories are plot driven , lacking in attention to character , without sentiment , and have no moral , social , or philosophical message . The deaths are mo... |
443,306 | 819,382 | 516,802 | 7 | Blowing Up the PM . | Much like the other episodes , this one involves some silly plot to blow up the Prime Minister while he's traveling on British Railways . It's cute and diverting , and it's probably more fun if you're a railroad buff . It's odd how many well-known character actors showed up in this series , but the Brits feel no shame ... |
442,481 | 819,382 | 420,223 | 7 | Third Person Omniscient . | This fantasy begins as a blend of " The Truman Show " with a soupçon of " The Accidental Tourist " and I expected a tricky commercial property designed in the course of some overnight caffeine binge to bring in as many shekels as possible . It's better than that , and I wound up waiting rather tensely to see how the th... |
443,524 | 819,382 | 31,842 | 7 | Another American Colonial Adventure . | The USA didn't have much of a foreign colonialist period . Like Germany , we came rather late to the game . Besides which Americans were busy colonizing their own interior . But in the mid - to late 1930s stories of colonial adventures abroad seemed to become suddenly popular in Hollywood , or at least simplified and r... |
443,573 | 819,382 | 45,323 | 7 | Robust and unpretentious comedy from Ford . | I can't remember the silent version , which I saw years ago . I think it's probably best known for the fact that the cuss words of Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt were clearly discernible , even to viewers without advanced training in lip reading . I have no idea what the original play was like . Ford's version could ... |
443,219 | 819,382 | 516,837 | 7 | Time Warp | More whimsy bordering on the silly but more diverting than some others . If you were filthy rich - - a deposed dictator , say , or a successful thief , or some rapscallion of a banker - - where would you go with all your loot without having to fear discovery ? Why back in time , of course . Fifteen seventy would be nic... |
442,155 | 819,382 | 516,841 | 7 | Fun . | One of the more imaginative episodes . Steed and Mrs . Peel investigate a series of deaths among an organization of UFO enthusiasts . The victims feel heat , then a whirring sound , then are struck dead and bleached in a blast of light . Some say that we are being invaded by Venusians , but the intrepid duo discover ot... |
441,741 | 819,382 | 52,990 | 7 | An idealist afloat in a sea of galoots . | Paul Muni is Dr . Sam Abelman , a frank and abrasive general practitioner whose office is in his apartment in a crummy neighborhood in Brooklyn . A shifty , pill-popping , TV producer ( David Wayne ) , producer of a program called " Americans USA " , as opposed to , say , " Americans Canada " , persuades Muni to appear... |
442,715 | 819,382 | 47,464 | 7 | Some snappy dialog here . | In the 50s , between historical epics , Chuck made a few pretty good exotic adventure flicks . Two of them were located in South America - - the one in which he is a plantation owner fighting both a horde of army ants and Eleanor Parker's sexual experience , and this one , in which his career consists apparently of not... |
442,201 | 819,382 | 120,176 | 7 | Implausible but stylish mystery . | Basically a story about the theft of a " process " , which we may here define as a " MacGuffin " , around which an elaborate industrial con game is organized . In any game ( an activity with rules , more than one participant , and a recognizable outcome ) there are only three elements : ( 1 ) physical skill ( you outdr... |
442,090 | 819,382 | 50,803 | 7 | Surprisingly suspenseful escape movie . | POW escape movies form almost a genre of their own and there were quite a few released in the late 1950s and in the 1960s . They mostly dealt with Allied POWs , naturally , and the drama was partly masked by expression of camaraderie and rough humor . This one , in simple black and white , has little of that . It's abo... |
441,659 | 819,382 | 45,546 | 7 | Emblematic of its type . | Nicely done genre movie , filled with familiar roles and the expectable sequence of events . An atomic blast near the North Pole melts the ice surrounding a Rhedosaurus . ( Ie . , a big lizard . Very big . ) The beast is spotted through a blizzard by one of the scientists monitoring the explosion ( Paul Hubschmid ) . H... |
441,737 | 819,382 | 120,188 | 7 | War is Heck . | George Clooney leads a group of ordinary GIs into Iraq in pursuit of Saddam Hussein's gold bullion in the aftermath of the Gulf War . ( Kids , that was 1991 . We won . ) At first the film looks like " Kelly's Heroes . " But that's only because the targeted gold allows for an exploration of some of the internal politica... |
441,987 | 819,382 | 43,132 | 7 | Noir Exemplar | Film noir is an overused expression when it comes to describing films . Every crime drama seems to be a " noir " . But " Where the Sidewalk Ends " really is a good example of what the genre is all about . Very briefly , an overzealous detective ( Andrews ) accidentally kills a no-goodnik who works for the mobsters . ... |
442,675 | 819,382 | 25,907 | 7 | Arrrr ! Where be the gold ? | Robert Louis Stevenson has written a fine tale of adventure , life on the high seas , pirates , treasure chests , betrayal and intrigue , and all that . This was the first book I can remember being given as a child . I was too young to understand the vocabulary or even the general thrust of the narrative . Of course I ... |
443,285 | 819,382 | 395,169 | 7 | Ambitious , successful TV-docudrama . | The story is familiar enough in its outline that I'll pretty much skip it . Basically , Don Cheadle's character , a hotel manager in Rwanda during the genocide , manages to save most of his family and more than a thousand Hutus who would otherwise have become victims in the slaughter . It's sometimes reminiscent of par... |
442,240 | 819,382 | 107,206 | 7 | Satisfactory Condition | This is another of Eastwood's many movies mixing intrigue , action , and a dollop of romance , along with " The Gauntlet , " " Firefox , " and so forth . Clint's acting range by now is pretty familiar . In this one , he's taciturn and a bit outrageous , especially with women and superiors . There are no surprises in hi... |
442,628 | 819,382 | 364,961 | 7 | Suicide by airplane . | There's a certain preposterous quality in the thinking of guys like Sam Bicke . A failed salesman and failed family man , his loathing comes to focus on President Richard M . Nixon , whom he intends to get rid of by forcing an airliner to fly into the White House . The thinking is preposterous because the rest of us - ... |
443,549 | 819,382 | 113,421 | 7 | The pedophiles will get you if you don't - - watch - - out ! | I don't know why this docudrama isn't more successful than it is . The issue it deals with is important enough . Maybe that's part of the problem . When you treat a tragedy with substandard techniques it cheapens the subject matter . The difficult , I think , lies mainly in the script . It gives us all the clichés of v... |
442,043 | 819,382 | 29,811 | 7 | Lively Comic Chase From Hitchcock | A young man ( Derek De Marney ) is accused of murder and jailed . His lawyer is a greedy nincompoop , so De Marney escapes , dragging along the innocent daughter ( Nova Pilbeam ) of the chief constable ( Percy Marmont ) . There follows the sort of comic yet thrilling Chase that Hitch's fans are familiar with from other... |
442,951 | 819,382 | 52,902 | 7 | Ford Blockbuster | This film is sometimes consigned to Ford's later , increasingly exhausted period , but if it had been made by an unknown it would have been applauded as a stunning directorial debut . It has its flaws , as all movies must , but it's a seamless blend of drama , romance , action , and comedy - - and it's a good example o... |
442,029 | 819,382 | 47,413 | 7 | Enjoyable Scott Western . | Considering the budget , and considering other constraints on its quality , this is pretty good - - efficient movie-making at its best . Randolph Scott is a shotgun rider on a stagecoach . The coach is held up and some former enemies capture Scott , hog tie his ass , and leave him to scorch to death in the sun . Tie up... |
442,803 | 819,382 | 375,679 | 7 | Through a glass darkly . | What " Traffic " did for drugs , " Crash " tries to do for race relations , and to a lesser extent succeeds . The crash of the title , presumably , refers to the offensive behavior of ethnic groups and races to one another . But behavior must be justified , and the justification here ( as in life ) evolves from the pri... |
443,206 | 819,382 | 67,959 | 7 | Bonjour Tristesse Tropique | Nicholas Roeg has this thing for sex and hidden menace . He even turns the fork of a tree into an obscene photograph . And the teen aged Jenny Agutter is no help either , running around in this skimpy skirt or in her underwear or sometimes nothing at all , which is nice . Meanwhile anything can happen . There's death a... |
442,220 | 819,382 | 55,100 | 7 | Frothy comedy . | If you liked " Pillow Talk " you'll like " Lover Come Back . " The two movies have the same principal cast and similar stories involving Doris Day mistaking a hated rival , Hudson , for an innocent naif . Tony Randall has the same role as Hudson's less magnetic sidekick . Thelma Ritter and her volcanic hangover are , a... |
443,474 | 819,382 | 327,056 | 7 | What happened to , " My mule don't like you laughin ' at him " ? | Clint Eastwood is a remarkable guy . As he eases into and through his 70s , he's taken more chances than ever , unlike Howard Hawks and so many other artists , who repeat themselves as they age . He's explored new milieus in each of his later movies - - a Western with no heroes , women's boxing , a disappearing ethnic ... |
443,547 | 819,382 | 62,794 | 7 | Educable retarded . | The director , Ralph Nelson , used to be the property master on the Twilight Zone , if I remember correctly , and to be honest he doesn't bring much to the party here . Split screens - - ugh . But this is more than made up for by almost everything else about the film - - the location shooting , the photography , the sc... |
442,897 | 819,382 | 107,144 | 7 | Exhilarating farce | Alright , this is a sequel and the frame is familiar , but it's still pretty funny and at times sidespittingly so . I can't begin to list ( or recognize ) all of the allusions to other movies that provide the springboard for this parody . That doesn't really matter . The opening sequence in which Richard Crenna induces... |
443,214 | 819,382 | 37,871 | 7 | Surprisingly - - Okay . | I wasn't expecting much at the start of the film . A Yank and a " Limey " escape from a POW train in northern Italy , decide to try for the Swiss border , and begin to trade wisecracks about cigarettes and food as they run into a few minor obstacles . And then , quite unexpectedly , it turns into a serious adult drama ... |
441,942 | 819,382 | 29,658 | 7 | Bundles of oppositions . | A pretty good story of the arrest , conviction , and lynching of a New York teacher ( Edwar Norris ) in the South , blamed for the murder of a young lady ( Lana Turner ) of which he may or may not be guilty . The ambitious DA who nails him is Claude Raines . Defense is provided by Otto Krueger . There are other familia... |
442,396 | 819,382 | 73,692 | 7 | A Jungian Sensation Type . | Warren Beatty is a high-end hairdresser who is trying to borrow money from Beverley Hills executive / businessman Jack Warden so he can open his own shop . Meanwhile , he's getting it on behind Warden's back with Warden's wife ( Lee Grant ) , Warden's girl friend ( Julie Christie ) , and Warden's daughter ( Carrie Fish... |
443,108 | 819,382 | 34,116 | 7 | Good Fun | Of the comedy teams that made a series of movies in the 1940s and 1950s , Hope and Crosby were probably the most engagingly amusing . Abbott and Costello were usually silly . Their movies seemed aimed at an audience of children , although some , like " Meet Frankenstein " , are outrageous . There was an element of sadi... |
442,529 | 819,382 | 94,712 | 7 | A rough lie . | It would have been easy to turn a story like this into a cheap action flick - - heroic downed USAF Colonel fights his way through enemy territory with help of heroic self-sacrificing black pilot . It doesn't happen , exactly . The story , as I understand it , is based on fact , but I don't know how much of it is factua... |
442,215 | 819,382 | 64,072 | 7 | A History Lesson | Are history books written by the winners , or what ? Adolph Galland , an ace fighter pilot of the war who flew Me109s with Mickey Mouse painted on the fuselage , was one of the many technical advisers on this film and he objected strongly to a couple of its features . He was irritated by the last scene in which Goering... |
443,531 | 819,382 | 34,167 | 7 | Flag-waving inoculation for US entry into World War II | Smoothly directed by Howard Hawks along Hollywood lines , the film is the biography - - or maybe " biography " - - of Alvin York , a hillbilly who engineered the survival of his unit and the capture of a massive number of Germans , winning the Congressional Medal of Honor . Historically it serves as an inoculation , gi... |
442,725 | 819,382 | 107,808 | 7 | Liesurely study of crime and character . | An escaped prison inmate ( Kevin Costner ) kidnaps a young boy ( T . J . Lowther ) , steals numerous cars , encounters people of various dispositions , and aims towards Alaska with his kidnapee . Meanwhile he is pursued across the panhandle , sometimes comically , by a Texas Ranger ( Clint Eastwood ) and a handful of a... |
442,467 | 819,382 | 110,014 | 7 | Murder rates soar on holidays . | This is one of the better feature-length episodes . There's nothing soppy about it , as there is likely to be in so many other Christmas tales . That's not Dame Agatha's style , nor Poirot's . ( Nor Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes for that matter - - the blue carbuncle . ) No syrupy little kids either . Thank heavens for... |
442,517 | 819,382 | 42,771 | 7 | Police , mystery , murder , efficiency . | This is one of those dark movies that came out of MGM while the studio was trying to catch up with the post-war mood of the country . It's exciting , enjoyable , and well executed . The locations are Boston and Cape Cod . The reason it has to be set around Boston is that a forensic physician from Harvard ( Bruce Bennet... |
441,676 | 819,382 | 498,380 | 7 | Do what is right , because it is right . | This is a pretty courageous movie . Eastwood has produced and directed the story of one of the most bitter conflicts of World War II - - which we get to see from the Japanese point of view . The Americans ( OUR side ) are the faceless enemies ! And it's not done by the numbers either . The doomed Japanese are not handl... |
442,007 | 819,382 | 36,323 | 7 | Purged in the desert . | An enjoyable war-time flag waver , the film has Humphrey Bogart as the sergeant in charge of a light tank that must trek to safety across miles of African desert , short on food and water , and carrying a motley bunch of crew members and passengers - - American , UK , Italian , French , and German . It establishes our ... |
442,827 | 819,382 | 37,980 | 7 | Entertaining Comedy of Manners | The English title , " Perfect Strangers , " was changed to " Vacation From Marriage " for its USA distribution . It's amazing that it ever was finished . Aside from a good deal of trouble concerning the script , it was filmed in 1944 when there was a shortage of sets and equipment and everything else in England except ... |
442,577 | 819,382 | 796,375 | 7 | Fine Cast in Decent Movie . | It's about this hit man , Ben Kingsley , who works for the Polish mob in Buffalo and turns into a drunk . When this begins to interfere with his precision he's sent to San Francisco to dry out and get himself in shape , supporting himself with a part-time job fixing corpses in a mortuary . ( " I don't mind bodies , " h... |
443,051 | 819,382 | 36,341 | 7 | Deliberate , chilling , and atmospheric . | It's hard to imagine how the producer Val Lewton managed to pull off these spooky , understated little films at RKO . The studio , envious of Universal's monster series , kept throwing these ludicrous titles at him . " The Cat People . " Did " The Cat People " make money ? Okay , then , " The CURSE of the Cat People . ... |
443,469 | 819,382 | 81,398 | 7 | Atypical Sports Story | The usual trajectory in a sports movie involves some underprivileged character discovering he has a talent , being put through a rigorous training by a mentor , riding that talent to national prominence , being undone by personal demons , and finally rediscovering himself . " Rocky " didn't fit the formula and neither ... |
443,081 | 819,382 | 69,281 | 7 | Lots of Fun . | I have to keep this short because anything beyond the briefest comment will begin to reveal some plot turns best kept secret . Basically , Michael Caine visits the wealthy mystery author Lawrence Olivier , whose wife he is about to steal off with . There follows a duel of wits . But they're pretty witty wits . Not all ... |
442,359 | 819,382 | 86,979 | 7 | Stylish Thriller . | An early effort by the Coen brothers , this is a little like a short story stretched out to feature length but executed with so much suspense and panache that it hardly registers that we are on the scenic route rather than the expressway . Briefly , Frances McDormand , the wife of the moody and embittered Dan Hedaya , ... |
443,347 | 819,382 | 51,525 | 7 | Painful but Necessary | Two prisoners , one black ( Sidney Poitier ) and one white ( Tony Curtis ) , escape after they've been shackled together by the wrists . They are pursued by a posse led by Sheriff Theodore Bikel . After several adventures they are captured . The plot is sketched out schematically . Every scene makes its point , then we... |
442,559 | 819,382 | 45,053 | 7 | Factory refurbished product . | Well it's a lot more colorful than the more familiar 1937 version , mainly because it's shot in Technicolor . Otherwise it's an almost shot-for-shot remake . If there were any changes in the dialog they slipped past the transcendental unity of my apperception . So if the story is the same , and the dialog is the same ,... |
443,407 | 819,382 | 40,098 | 7 | Throw Anna Under the Train . | If you're ever tempted to write a classic novel , one that's bound to be bound in buckram with gilt lettering , designed to last forever and forced on college literature students , you can't go too wrong with this simple plot : A beautiful but impetuous woman marries a reliable but somewhat dull man , usually older or ... |
441,866 | 819,382 | 84,556 | 7 | Cheesy , funny . | If you're carrying around inside your head a schema of Michael Moriarty as Ben Stone , Assistant DA on " Law and Order , " the grim , determined , rigidly moral prosecutor , this movie will shake you up . Like an animated cardboard Halloween skeleton he is hardly ever at rest , his skinny frame flapping and wobbling , ... |
442,939 | 819,382 | 74,860 | 7 | Good Action / Thriller | There's nothing much original in the plot , and there isn't much in the way of character development , but this is a first-rate thriller with some excellent performances and fine direction . Schlesinger has put the film together in such a way that there isn't a dull moment . Even though some of the moments themselves m... |
441,682 | 819,382 | 40,076 | 7 | Fast Flynn Swashbuckler . | This was Flynn's last big one . He was only 38 at the time but had begun drinking in the afternoon , causing problems on the set , what with multiple retakes and a major binge that lasted several weeks . It's not " The Sea Hawk " or " Robin Hood . " Still , the film was artfully edited and clearly a lot of money was sp... |
442,631 | 819,382 | 90,180 | 7 | Competent crime thriller . | It's a genre movie but the director , William Friedkin , knows how to put them together effectively . We have two Secret Service agents . One ( Peterson ) is a reckless rule-defying loose cannon ; his partner ( Pankow ) is more principled , or uptight , if you like . During a chase , when Peterson is laughing , Pankow ... |
442,338 | 819,382 | 34,248 | 7 | Murder in Mind . | Cary Grant is here , as elsewhere , very likable . Impulsive , playful , flirtatious , devilishly handsome , and above all , charming . Too charming , in fact . There have always been signals behind that dazzling smile and that dashing dimple , that nobody could be so quick , so on top of things , could embody so much ... |
442,458 | 819,382 | 62,038 | 7 | Please Pass the Tofranil | This movie mixes several points together . They are not exactly seamlessly joined , true , but each is followable and interesting in its own right . In no particular order , we have the irony of ex-Wehrmacht officers and men doing quite all right in the 1960s Wirtschaftskwelle of Germany . One of the characters we've b... |
443,204 | 819,382 | 49,470 | 7 | Don't make a move or the kid gets it ! | Ostensibly a story about the young child of Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day . The kid gets kidnapped to keep his parents quiet . They know something about a plot to assassinate the ambassador of an unnamed country during a performance at Albert Hall in London . The movie is rich in Hitchcockian incidents . A friendly but o... |
442,588 | 819,382 | 79,240 | 7 | Thoroughly enjoyable and witty caper . | Maybe not the great train robbery but a pretty good one . Michael Crighton is not an artist but he's a fine storyteller . Often his films are better than his novels . But everything comes together in this one - - script , score , direction , photography , and performances . How does someone like Leslie Anne Down come t... |
442,824 | 819,382 | 25,164 | 7 | Chance is a Foolish Name for Fate . | I've been trying to figure out the difference between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly . I don't mean their physical presences . Those differences are obvious : Kelly was muscular and Astaire was skinny . But their styles are different too . Kelly's background was in athletics , Astaire's in ballroom dancing , and it shows ... |
442,360 | 819,382 | 38,109 | 7 | Involving murder mystery . | Once you accept the basic premise that psychoanalysis " works , " you wind up with a pretty good , thoroughly Hitchcockian murder mystery . Not one of his comic thrillers like " The Man Who Knew Too Much , " and not a gloomy " The Wrong Man " either . More like " Shadow of a Doubt " but less subtle and more theory depe... |
441,816 | 819,382 | 53,354 | 7 | Breezy adaptation . | A zippy and enjoyable version of John Buchan's novel , far lighter in tone that Hitchcock's . The versions differ in more than tone . In Hitchcock's film , Hannay undergoes different sorts of divagations and dangers than he does here , in Ralph Thomas's film . There's nothing wrong with that . Neither film is a close a... |
443,314 | 819,382 | 36,104 | 7 | Exciting Small-Budget Murder Mystery . | Produced by Val Lewton's horror unit at RKO and directed by Jaques Tourneur , this was done on a minuscule budget . That has to be emphasized , otherwise somebody's going to start comparing it to " The Exorcist " or " Titanic " or " Pearl Harbor " and call it a cheap piece of junk . It's not , really . From a Cornell W... |
442,911 | 819,382 | 31,619 | 7 | It's good to be the king - - sometimes . | Fast-paced version of A . Dumas ' complicated tale of intrigue , power , love , kinship and whatnot in the court of Louis XIV in the mid 1700s . When I say complicated , I mean complicated . Louis XIII ( Albert Dekker in a tiny role ) is King of France and needs an heir to the throne . To his dismay , his feckless wife... |
442,303 | 819,382 | 445,922 | 7 | You Can Still Find the Scattered Limbs of the Poet . | Invenias disjecti membra poetæ . The scattered remains that Horace referred to are pretty much found here . Julie Taymor's film just about captures most of 1967 and 1968 , illustrated in a thin but socially relevant story linking some Beatles songs of the period . The songs are the thing . They're not the original re... |
442,996 | 819,382 | 71,577 | 7 | A for Effort | Quick - - name a seed you put in the garage . Caraway . Get it ? I don't know who said that the pun was the lowest form of humor but obviously he wasn't a fan of the London Times Crossword . They keep trying to make a decent movie out of this wonderful novel and they haven't got it right yet . Robert Redford's performa... |
443,122 | 819,382 | 82,517 | 7 | Often funny , sometimes very funny , slapdash comedy . | Mel Brooks ' blackout sketches , mostly involving cave men , ancient Rome , the Inquisition , and the French Revolution , with a lot of other stuff thrown in . The various shreds are so impulsively but personally patched together that one wonders how he could have gotten such a cast , mostly familiar old timers . The s... |
442,394 | 819,382 | 49,513 | 7 | Above Average Adaptation | Captain Ahab ( Gregory Peck ) commands the whaler Pequod in 1842 and convinces the crew that they should pursue and kill the giant white whale , Moby Dick , instead of doing their jobs . Ahab has vengeance on his mind , the whale having divested him of a leg on a previous voyage . But it goes beyond that . The whale st... |
443,113 | 819,382 | 253,586 | 7 | Schizophrenia in the raw . | There have been a multitude of movies that have looked at mental illness , from inside and out , but I don't know of any that has romanticized schizophrenia less than this one . No colorful Blanche Dubois here , with her tag lines like , " I've always depended on the kindness of strangers . " No stunningly gorgeous Cat... |
442,938 | 819,382 | 31,314 | 7 | Crash survivors battle Ur-shrinks . | This is a kind of likable , fast , black-and-white , Grand Hotel , airplane-in-peril movie . You see , there are eleven people of varied background who board a passenger airplane , which crashes in the Amazon jungle , and only five people can be flown out when the plane is repaired and takes off again . Of the passenge... |
442,519 | 819,382 | 42,530 | 7 | Better Than It Has a Right To Be . | It's a cheap , primitive film and it more than succeeds in what it was trying to do . We follow a pair of sharpshooters who have met at a carnival - - the sassy Peggy Cummins and the reform-school graduate , John Dall , a kind of Scandinavian George Hamilton . They're in love but broke and , attracted as they are to gu... |
442,989 | 819,382 | 38,245 | 7 | Enjoyable Family Fantasy | First saw this half a lifetime ago on a black-and-white TV in a small Samoan village and thought it was hilarious . Now , having seen it for the second time , so much later , I don't find it hilarious . I don't find ANYTHING hilarious anymore . But this is a witty and light-hearted comedy that moves along quickly witho... |
443,598 | 819,382 | 129,387 | 7 | Raunchy and funny . | There are these three guys out after Mary ( Cameron Diaz ) , or maybe four or five or six , depending on how you count . The most important are , first , Ben Stiller , the shy nobody who has had a crush on her since high school in Providence , Rhode Island . Years later he learns Mary lives in Florida , and Stiller hir... |
443,003 | 819,382 | 36,037 | 7 | Lost Patrol | This is one of those movies about a handful of soldiers lost in the desert who must find and fight their way home . But , if the plot is familiar , this is a pretty well executed example . Combat aside , it's the story of the maturation of Henry Fonda , the bashful , receding , passive , loner of a corporal who suddenl... |
443,379 | 819,382 | 51,201 | 7 | Suspenseful and amusing Christie | It's hard to imagine how Dame Agatha could have pounded out so many mysteries . I know she lived a long time , but still , if I lived as long as Methusala I couldn't grind out that many pieces . Not just novels , either , but plays , including this one . And they all tell the kinds of stories that involve a lot of lead... |
443,133 | 819,382 | 44,706 | 7 | A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do . | Marshall Kane has something in common with Citizen Kane . They both rise to the top of their professions , are headstrong and unyielding , and find themselves alone and alienated from their friends , but that's about where the similarity ends . " Citizen Kane " has a complex narrative structure , is filled with ambigui... |
443,078 | 819,382 | 218,839 | 7 | Successful comedy about a dog show , sometimes very funny . | Diverse people travel to Philadelphia to show their dogs and vie for championship , and we tap into all the relationships . Let's see . There's the argumentative , spoiled Yuppie couple . The taciturn guy from the Southern bait shop . The affable trailer-trash couple from Fern City , Florida . The lesbian couple who sh... |
441,808 | 819,382 | 33,891 | 7 | Craftsmanship , funny and touching . | It's best to think of this as a Great Depression story , when it was probably conceived . Barbara Stanwyck is a reporter who tries to keep her job by concocting a letter from a nonexistent " John Doe " who is mad as hell and is not going to take it anymore . So he's going to jump of a skyscraper at midnight on Christma... |
442,196 | 819,382 | 73,453 | 7 | What's it all about , Harry ? | It's a finely made movie , beginning with Michael Small's deliciously jazzy score which rolls along under the credits , using only rhythm and vibes . At more dramatic moments the theme is echoed by a mournful oboe . There are touches of Gil Evans and Gunther Schuller in the arrangements . The score could probably stand... |
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