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441,964 | 819,382 | 27,996 | 8 | Amusing , Harmless Populist Fantasy | You'll probably like this Frank Capra comedy if you haven't already seen it . Gary Cooper is Longfellow Deeds , a small-town writer of Hallmark doggerel who plays the trombone and is amiable and generous . He inherits 20 million dollars and goes to New York , where he is ridiculed and betrayed by Jean Arthur , an under... |
441,971 | 819,382 | 24,069 | 8 | A Fanfare of Strumpets . Disgusting . | It's difficult to choose the most revolting scene in this story of showgirls fleecing decent men in order to put on a " show , " but if one were forced to pick , probably the most qualified scene involves a depraved midget playing a six-month-old infant peeking up a girl's skirt . In the course of this musical number ,... |
442,571 | 819,382 | 33,373 | 8 | The Theory and Practice of Being a Sucker . | Professor Bertram Potts ( Gary Cooper ) and his six assorted old oddballs who are trying to put together an encyclopedia are forced by hoodlums ( Dana Andrews , Dan Duryea , et al ) to take in Sugarpuss O'Shea ( Barbara Stanwyck ) and hide her from the police . Cooper and Stanwyck fall for each other and wind up gettin... |
442,085 | 819,382 | 58,385 | 8 | Lavish , Lavisher , Lavishest . | You have to keep your eyes open when a monster musical rumbles in your direction . You're liable to be demolished by a " Dr . Doolittle " or smothered in sugar by a " Sound of Music " with its " lark that is learning to pray . " " My Fair Lady " is as big and expensive as any of them , but it deserves nothing but appla... |
443,387 | 819,382 | 43,075 | 8 | Brutal Moralistic Crime Drama | Frank Lovejoy is a veteran who never was sent overseas during the war . He can't find a job to support his wife ( Kathleen Ryan ) and little boy . Angry , embittered , and perhaps a little guilty , he falls in with bad guy Lloyd Bridges who sport platinum cuff links and seems to be enjoying himself all over the little ... |
442,746 | 819,382 | 391,024 | 8 | Perception and Substance | They are a horde of sand monkeys screaming hysterically , jumping up and down , waving their fists in the air , and they all have their heads wrapped in tablecloths stolen from Italian restaurants - - right ? Well , not quite , according to this documentary from Noujaim , which focuses on the producers and staff of the... |
441,761 | 819,382 | 41,113 | 8 | Politicians corrupt ? You're kidding ! | There are lots of movies about the rise of some obscure person into the celebrity life , and the person turns out to be an ambitious and unscrupulous phony . Some of them are pretty good - - " Citizen Kane , " " All About Eve . " Some are mediocre - - " Keeper of the Flame . " This is one of the best . The acting honor... |
442,176 | 819,382 | 37,884 | 8 | That calls for a drink . | It's not exactly a funny movie . After all , being a career drunkard is a lot of work . It takes devotion , cunning , effort , time , and talent . In the course of the movie the hero , Don Burnham ( Ray Milland ) discovers that it takes more character to be a drunk than to be a writer . I vaguely remember the novel . B... |
442,813 | 819,382 | 37,988 | 8 | Fleeting Time Thou Hast Left Me Old . | I've seen this recently for only the second time and found it as impressive as it was the first time round . That's especially surprising considering the screenwriter and director , Albert Lewin , never considered one of Hollywood's golden boys . Yet he does a good and efficient job here . The direction lacks unnecessa... |
442,620 | 819,382 | 230,169 | 8 | Deranged | Considered as a film about an unhappy and perverted man , the movie is so-so , perhaps a bit more . A boy and his brother grow up on a dismal farm . Their father is brutal , their mother religious and caring but stern too . Always , when they show weakness , there is the shadow of the allegation of femininity hanging i... |
443,322 | 819,382 | 42,792 | 8 | shocking - - then and now . | Cut up in various states including Pennsylvania , banned in the South for years , it's hard to see how this movie managed to be made . I'm not even sure they could do it now in our oh-so-sophisticated new century . The " N " word became taboo after it played such a prominent part in the O . J . Simpson trial . And the ... |
443,021 | 819,382 | 37,954 | 8 | Good Example of the Genre | A good example of a Warner Brothers war drama , it's full of clichés appropriate to the times . The Japanese are " moral idiots , " " savages , " and " monkeys " ( three times ) . Men shout and wave at a search plane two or three miles away ( three times ) . The men are the usual congeries of ethnicity - - " Gabby " Go... |
442,917 | 819,382 | 110,005 | 8 | A Room of Their Own | It would be easy enough to become a fan of movies about weird Australian schoolgirls if they were all as interesting and well done as " Picnic at Hanging Rock " and " Heavenly Creatures . " This more or less true story of Paula and Juliet is nicely directed in a style almost opposite of that in Weir's " Picnic at Hangi... |
442,015 | 819,382 | 74,806 | 8 | Little , yes , but clever too . | I'm about to spill most of the beans here so if you don't want to know what happens , read no farther . Jody Foster is Rynn , the little girl who lives down the lane in a spotless , New England cottage , with her reclusive poet father . Or so it seems . When a nosy landlady , Alexis Smith , looking mighty good , shows ... |
442,871 | 819,382 | 379,725 | 8 | A Story of Two Men Who Had Something in Common . | Richard Brooks directed an earlier version of Capote's book , " In Cold Blood , " in 1968 that seems in retrospect to have been made for a mass audience . For the most part it takes the point of view of the killers , Smith and Hickock , their childhoods , their fantasies , their travels , their barbaric crimes . Truman... |
441,658 | 819,382 | 253,474 | 8 | Survivor | Film makers have to step carefully when dealing with issues like the Nazi extermination program . There have been equally brutal programs of ethnic cleansing in places like Southeast Asia and Rwanda , in which hundreds of millions died , but nothing like this in Europe since the Middle Ages . The victims here were not ... |
442,773 | 819,382 | 100,157 | 8 | Crime and Pun | Misery is the first name of the heroine of a series of rather crummy novels that have been written by Paul Sheldon , who longs to get out of this repetitive literary rut and into heavy lit , almost as much as Conan-Doyle wanted to dump Sherlock Holmes . It is also the dominant emotional tonus of Paul himself during m... |
441,929 | 819,382 | 265,459 | 8 | Behind the smiley face . | SPOILERS . Freud called it " sublimation " when you convert your neurotic anxiety into a constructive channel such as your work or your art , and that's what Robin Williams shows his character doing here , in a fine subdued dramatic performance . People bring their film to him to be developed in the SavMart . And altho... |
442,334 | 819,382 | 79,182 | 8 | Iwao : Portrait of a Serial Murderer . | Yes , the Japanese can have serial killers too , and they can make movies about them , and this is one powerful movie . In its technique , it comes closer to " Henry : Portrait of a Serial Killer " in its episodic and somewhat rambling narrative than to any of the dozens of other American junk being ground out about Ed... |
442,594 | 819,382 | 404,203 | 8 | Parental Guidance Recommended | James Joyce once advised us to " wipe your glosses with what you know . " There aren't many Giant Novelists around anymore because we don't seem to have enough of the right kind of majestic stresses that produce the urge to capture and explain them . No more Great Depressions , World Wars , that sort of thing , so no m... |
442,259 | 819,382 | 62,138 | 8 | A genre movie unlike any other . | When I worked in a psychiatric hospital I noticed that one or two of the patients had a peculiar tendency to stand up , start walking purposefully across the ward , stop and look around , then begin walking just as purposefully in another direction , then sit down again . A kind of ambulatory non sequitur . This whole ... |
442,268 | 819,382 | 379,889 | 8 | Hate , not money , makes the world go round . | This is a tough play to put on for a couple of reasons . First and foremost there's the issue of anti-Semitism , any discussion of which really belongs elsewhere . It's amazing how closely Shakespeare's Shylock resembles the modern stereotype - - greedy , clannish , proud , angry - - especially considering that the aut... |
442,280 | 819,382 | 38,120 | 8 | Moving Picture | Spoilers . When I saw this years ago it struck me as not having enough battle scenes in it . Now with my blood testosterone leveling off I think I have a better handle on it . Most war movies of the period seemed to include three elements whenever possible : combat , romance , and banter between battles . This one has ... |
442,581 | 819,382 | 73,540 | 8 | There's some questions that has answers , and others don't . | What a movie . Australia started come out with films that received worldwide attention in the early 1980s , with " The Last Wave " , and a cascade of them has followed , from the raucous " Mad Max " to more contemplative issues . And on top of that , they've been putting out a horde of toothsome blonds , from Olivia Ne... |
441,792 | 819,382 | 49,471 | 8 | Sometimes I Know How He Feels | This is a fundamentally true story , well done , in a way that puts major old-fashioned movie conventions to work , and is worth spending a few hours on . Clifton Webb as Ewen Montague is the British naval officer who dreams up the idea of letting a dead body with phony IDs and phony secret messages drift ashore in Por... |
442,177 | 819,382 | 44,829 | 8 | Funny , at times hilarious . | Ealing Studios turned out a series of comic gems in the late 40s and early 50s and this is a good example . Only a curmudgeon would not laugh aloud during some of the scenes . The plot , briefly , involves a clever bank clerk ( Guiness ) developing a plan with a die caster ( Holloway ) to steal several million pounds o... |
442,730 | 819,382 | 46,806 | 8 | Tragic story of war . | William Holden is a naval aviator in 1952 , flying from a carrier against shore installations in Korea . His wife is Grace Kelly . His pals who fly the rescue helicopter are Mickey Rooney and Earl Holliman . The admiral who runs the show is Frederick March , who looks upon Holden as a son . Charles McGraw is Holden's i... |
442,868 | 819,382 | 64,177 | 8 | Colossus - - Forbin Barada Nicto ! | A well-done made-for-TV SF movie . The script is as full of holes as a cheese grater but no matter . Okay , the computer science is nonsense . And it's a little hard to imagine two scientific colleagues , a man and woman , being kept prisoner by a deranged gigantic computer spending two nights together as part of a sub... |
442,973 | 819,382 | 44,876 | 8 | A lesson in economics and understatement | One of the things that makes this Ealing comedy so outrageously funny is the clever editing . Shots that would be considered absolutely essential to most modern comedies are deliberately left out . ( This is what was known as British understatement . ) Three instances : A comic fight is edited like this . Alec Guiness ... |
441,877 | 819,382 | 71,604 | 8 | Successful propaganda . | Davis does a neat job of laying out the absurdity in the US's involvement in Vietnam . He does it mainly through the use of two techniques . ( 1 ) Successive contrast , as it's called in the psychology of perception . If you stare at a black square for a while , then switch your gaze to a gray square , it looks white ,... |
441,881 | 819,382 | 38,032 | 8 | Deliciously lighthearted fare . | If you need some laughs , this is a movie for you . I think this is the fourth of the " Road " pictures that Hope and Crosby made together . " The Road to Rio " was good , too , but the ones that followed demonstrated a flagging of inspiration . Here , they are the crew are at their best . The plot is screwball , as us... |
442,719 | 819,382 | 38,260 | 8 | Kaye's funniest ? | Well , it may or may not be Kaye's funniest movie . " Up in Arms " was pretty funny and so were some others , but this is as good as any of them . It not only features Kaye's ridiculous songs , which were later to become a staple and slightly banal part of his on screen persona , but it has special effects that were at... |
442,159 | 819,382 | 42,531 | 8 | Uneasy Lies the Head . | Gregory Peck is Jimmy Ringo , a gunfighter with three vengeful brothers on his tail and a squirt in every town ready to challenge him for the title of fastest gun . He stops for a few hours in Cayenne , barely escaping a couple of potentially lethal contretemps , especially a face off with the local fast boy , Skip Hom... |
442,624 | 819,382 | 46,876 | 8 | Classic of its inexpensive kind . | A couple of scientists hire a fishing boat to take them up a tributary of the Amazon to capture a living fossil . Some of them get away . That's about it for the plot , which I'm sure must be adequately described elsewhere . Just a few rambling comments seem called for . In Samoa there are tidal pools sprinkled among t... |
442,089 | 819,382 | 389,557 | 8 | Excellent film about Dutch resistance . | Says my TV guide , " In World War II Holland , a woman of the Jewish resistance falls in love with the German officer she was sent to seduce . " That makes it sound like another sappy love story . We visualize the scene in which the luscious babe holds a trembling pistol against the head of her sleeping Nazi lover , he... |
442,234 | 819,382 | 89,941 | 9 | Runaway Symbolism ? | Bad original title there . It sounds as if Ben Johnson should be at the controls and Charles Bronson should be the expert who figures out how to save all the passengers except the nut-case villain , maybe Dennis Hopper , who expires along with all the machinery in an exploding fireball as the locomotive plummets from a... |
443,125 | 819,382 | 33,028 | 9 | Into the yards and loosen your stays ! | What style ! What dash ! They don't come much better than this . In fact , they don't come at all anymore . It's a splendid genre picture from Warner Brothers when they were at the top of their game . No philosophy , no pretense , no artiness , just love and adventure and action . Except , come to think of it , the who... |
441,849 | 819,382 | 54,473 | 9 | Extremely funny boy's club comedy | Who Was That Lady ? has no deep theme underlying the comedy , but neither do many of the best comedies . This one begins as it ends , with laughter . It's not belly laughs all the way through , but even the laughless parts consist of plot mechanisms that are per se at least amusing and serve as set-ups for later guff... |
442,763 | 819,382 | 78,326 | 9 | Fine Film | Spoilers . There are so many things that seem ( to a viewer , anyway , if not an ex-inmate ) exactly right . I won't go over the story , since that's been adequately limned . But let me mention the makeup and wardrobe . What unspeakable sleaze . Hoffman's mustache looks like it belong on some grubneck posing for a mug ... |
443,012 | 819,382 | 66,206 | 9 | Epic hagiography | It's a splendidly done movie . Scott's performance is powerful . He does everything but reach out , grab you by the shirt , and shout in your face . Karl Malden is likable and full of common sense , but he is the only person in the movie whom we can grasp as a character - - except for Scott himself . Scott is as good a... |
441,965 | 819,382 | 21,814 | 9 | Part of our common cultural iconography . | A couple of things always occur to me during the opening scenes . One is that Renfield is a moron for ignoring the villagers ' pleas for him to stay off the Borgo Pass on Walpurgisnacht . " Dah CASTLE ? Castle DRAH-coo-la ? ? ? ? " Why take chances ? Especially when Renfield notices that his carriage has no driver and ... |
443,382 | 819,382 | 41,866 | 9 | Among Ford and Wayne's Best . | Of course it's corny and it reflects the values of World War II , in which John Ford , the director , had played a considerable part , but that's more than made up for by the capture on celluloid of a living , vibrant community . Wayne's performance is among his best . Maybe better than anything else he's done . He sig... |
442,288 | 819,382 | 50,371 | 9 | Arkansas Traveler | Budd Schulberg wrote this and the story it was based on . He doesn't get the kind of credit he deserves . He did some hard research for " On the Waterfront " in order to dig up lines like , " You take away dem pistoleros you got in there and you're nothing ' . You hear me ? You're NUTHIN ' . " Compared to " On the Wate... |
442,102 | 819,382 | 41,546 | 9 | You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style . | There's more than a touch of Oscar Wilde in this film . There is irony and elegant decadence , both in the visuals and in the script . The narrator , Louis Mazzini ( Price ) , has murdered several people who stand between him and the title to which he feels entitled . Invited to go on a hunt with one of his victims-to-... |
442,605 | 819,382 | 45,943 | 9 | Definitely not " The Ten Commandments " ! | A lot of people don't like Shakespeare much . Maybe they're intimidated by the language or the complicated plots . It's understandable . The Bard came up with some real clunkers : " Comedy of Errors , " " Love's Labour Lost . " And it's hard to read the plays in the raw because you're liable to understand one word out ... |
441,691 | 819,382 | 78,037 | 9 | One of the best . | Like an earlier commentor , I saw it in 1980 and have never been able to shake the memory of the gripping story , splendid acting , and dramatic musical score . It certainly contains some of Sam Waterston's finest work . He and the writers depict Oppenheimer not simply as an unjustly victimized hero - - which he was - ... |
442,284 | 819,382 | 34,891 | 9 | Fine cast in unimpeachable film . | Noel Coward is usually associated with bright bubbly comedies and musicals but here , as director and star in a flag-waving British war movie , he plays it straight , so to speak , muting the plummier aspects of his elocution . But , his splendid and reserved performance notwithstanding , this isn't really his picture ... |
441,636 | 819,382 | 50,212 | 9 | Among the Best . | This may be the best war movie - - if that's what it is - - that was ever put together . I don't think it would be made today . It was expensive and there were no women in it to speak of , and any committee member with an MBA reading the script would wonder why there wasn't more action . Further , the movie hasn't got ... |
443,548 | 819,382 | 166,924 | 9 | No hay sentido común ? | So many people seem puzzled by this film but I don't know why . The interpretation is clear enough . You see , the thing is , the apartment manager Coco ( Miller ) is simply dreaming that she is Betty ( Watts ) who is in turn dreaming that she is Rita ( Harring ) . Near the beginning of the film , when the amnesic Rita... |
443,309 | 819,382 | 51,196 | 9 | Thoroughly Successful 50s Comedy . | What a neatly done job this is . Tony Randall is Rock Hunter , a minor functionary at a Madison Avenue advertising agency ( this is a 1950s comedy and Mad Ave was the target of many jokes ) . He's about to be furloughed from his organization and then , by accident , manages to nail the outrageous Jayne Mansfield for he... |
442,068 | 819,382 | 169,547 | 9 | Anomiville , US | You can probably count on your fingers the number of successful above-average films that have been made about surburban life . ( " Lolita " is one . " No Down Payment " is not . ) Excluding the ones in which the house is taken over by a gang of rapist thugees or whatnot . There used to be a genre called suburban litera... |
442,508 | 819,382 | 62,622 | 9 | I think , therefore I am . ( I think . ) | Nobody could have done it better than Kubrick . The question is , " What does ' it ' mean ? " I'll skip the story , what there is of it . Anyone who wants a reasonably decent explanation in coherent terms ought to consult the Film Guide series from Indiana University Press . It is an unforgettable movie that would not ... |
441,721 | 819,382 | 80,789 | 9 | Nicely Done | Watching this flick I kept mulling over how many actors had played lawyers in other movies . Let's see . Lane Smith , of course , in " My Cousin Vinnie " ( and " Nixon , " I guess ) , John Houseman in " The Paper Trail , " Dean Jagger in " Twelve O'Clock High , " Jose Ferrer in " The Caine Mutiny " and " Blood and Orch... |
441,841 | 819,382 | 113,309 | 9 | God is in the details | A very good docudrama . But you must be in the mood . It's a low-budget enterprise , talky , and with no bravura performances . Why is it good , then ? I guess it's because it makes certain demands on the intelligence and moral concerns of the viewer that few other renditions of this story have bothered to even attempt... |
443,359 | 819,382 | 35,616 | 9 | Exemplary Hawks | An exciting , touching , and funny movie , one of Hawks ' best . It's a richly textured work , with several sub-narratives weaved into one another . The most important is the voyage of the new B-17 , the " Mary Ann " , from California to Honolulu to Wake Island to Clark Field in the Phillipines . Movies about journeys ... |
443,261 | 819,382 | 70,077 | 9 | Metabetrayal | George V . Higgins ' novel flowed along filled with atmosphere , intrigue , and ironic dialogue . Even Normal Mailer praised it , however reluctantly - - " And to think that this came from the fuzz ! " Well , practically no movie is as good as the book . How can you squash a book-length story into an hour and a half , ... |
443,215 | 819,382 | 642,420 | 9 | One of the funniest episodes . | Married With Children certainly hit its stride during this , the fourth season . The characters had been thoroughly defined so that jokes could be carried over from one episode to the next , and the writers by this time knew precisely what they were doing . Brief summary , for those who demand A LOT OF INFORMATION . ... |
442,398 | 819,382 | 32,138 | 9 | Dorothy , the Small and Meek . | Beautiful fantasy , unimpeachably realized . Dorothy is knocked out and dreams she is transported to the Land of Oz , where only the Wizard of the Emerald City can send her and her dog , Toto , back to her home in Kansas . Along the way , she picks up three companions who hope that their defects can be corrected by the... |
443,235 | 819,382 | 204,058 | 9 | We killed everything that moved . | An inexpert , black-and-white documentary consisting mostly of two dozen young vets from the Vietnam War at a panel presentation , describing the atrocities , martial and otherwise , that they witnessed , with an occasional break for a rant on race and an epilogue in which three of the guys describe their gradual reali... |
442,354 | 819,382 | 43,265 | 9 | Not to Be Missed . | Everything works together in this romantic adventure . Down the Ulanga with seedy Bogie and starchy Hepburn in the beaten-up old African Queen . Ride the rapids , go over a waterfall , suffer the slings and arrows of the German fort at Shona , get half eaten by clouds of flying gnats , be leeched by slimy critters as y... |
443,226 | 819,382 | 642,353 | 9 | Arguably the funniest episode . | In my admittedly warped opinion , this is about as good as situation comedy gets . Al wants to become famous in the world of shoes , and Kelly's assignment from the Larry Storch School of Acting is to shoot a movie . The two combine their lack of skills and make a movie about shoes . They misspell the title , which com... |
443,586 | 819,382 | 53,125 | 9 | Best in Show . | A lot of directors have taken a crack at the comedy-laced thriller , among them , most notably , Alfred Hitchcock , but probably none have topped this for sheer entertainment value . Cary Grant is a stereotypical Madison Avenue advertising man in the 1950s , shallow and given to " expedient exaggerations . " He's urban... |
442,780 | 819,382 | 57,012 | 9 | Superlative . | The best black comedy ever made . I could watch it a thousand times and still laugh . Oh - - dated , sure . There no longer is a Soviet Union , although there are plenty of people willing to barbecue one another nuclearly - - as in India and Pakistan . I'd like to mention the writer on this , the late Terry Southern , ... |
443,085 | 819,382 | 57,163 | 9 | A lesson in making a movie . | A story about four people living on a modest Texas ranch , their interactions , troubles and joys , and the ways they resolve their conflicts . The owner of the ranch is the elderly Homer Bannon ( Melvyn Douglas ) . His surviving son is Hud ( Paul Newman ) . Hud's nephew , Lon ( Brandon De Wilde ) is the naive seventee... |
443,065 | 819,382 | 92,048 | 9 | Zen and the Art of Noodle Eating | No , a Japanese comedy isn't an oxymoron . In this one you can forget all the swordplay of the Samurai movies , and all the tragedy of the modern dramas . This one is really funny . The plot is skeletal . Two guys happen upon a woman named Tampopo ( " Dandelion " ) trying to manage a run-down noodle shop and they decid... |
443,028 | 819,382 | 50,825 | 9 | Kubrick's Most Moving Film . | It's easy to snare an audience by making a movie about an execution , which is why such movies seem so common - - " Ted Bundy , " " I Want to Live " , " The Book of Daniel . " Sometimes the whole story is about the technical aspects of the execution - - " The Execution of Private Slovick . " It may be easier for an aud... |
443,217 | 819,382 | 996,994 | 9 | Through American Eyes | I don't know that this is quite the equivalent of Ken Burns ' " The Civil War " - - but what could be ? The general outlines of World War II are so well known ( Kids : We won ) that I'll skip them and just make a few comments . The presentation is divided roughly into three equal parts : ( 1 ) Life on the home front in... |
441,782 | 819,382 | 45,537 | 9 | Yes , the show MUST go on ! | A fine MGM musical with Fred Astaire as an aging hoofer , Cyd Charisse as the condescending ballerina , Jack Buchanan as the director of the show , and Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant as Astaire's friends and co-stars . There are many musicals that have great numbers but discardable plots . In this case , the librettis... |
441,712 | 819,382 | 265,086 | 9 | Mission Impossible | This is a very difficult film to evaluate . I'm not sure exactly how closely the narrative follows the historical facts , for one thing . Certainly some of the dialog is fictional , but it's less the dialog than the layout of the situation that needs to be understood , and the movie is weak on that point . One of the d... |
442,818 | 819,382 | 47,472 | 9 | Charming MGM Musical . | The eldest of the seven Pontiphy brothers ( Howard Keel ) , who live in a filthy ramshackle farmhouse in the Idaho mountains of 1850 , comes to town looking for a wife . He finds one in the person of Jane Powell , a cook in the local boarding house . Powell works her buns off cleaning up this pig stye and making dinner... |
442,995 | 819,382 | 14,429 | 9 | Without a Net | One of the best contructed full-length comedies of the twenties . Harold Lloyd was not as outrageously inventive as Chaplin , nor as sentimental . His style was a kind of minimalist one , taking a simple idea - - say , being a hasseled salesman in a clothing store and needing desperately to become a success - - and bui... |
443,397 | 819,382 | 97,977 | 9 | One spooky movie . | Scarier than cannibalistic zombies or mutant rats , this is a fictional story built around a real incident . In the early years of the atomic age , Emilio Estevez is a scientist working for the Atomic Energy Commission and is involved in testing bombs in Nevada . We don't hear much about it , but man were those tests b... |
442,688 | 819,382 | 24,216 | 9 | Larger Than Life . | The thing has become an icon of vernacular culture . A decade or so ago an artist arranged to have a huge balloon of King Kong blown up and attached to the top of the Empire State Building . It didn't work . The consarned thing kept deflating and flapping around in the unanticipated wind . No matter . The image of Kong... |
442,393 | 819,382 | 47,396 | 9 | Habitat for Humanity | James Stewart , a prize-winning photographer , is cooped up in his Greenwich Village apartment with a broken leg . Bored , he watches his diverse neighbors around the courtyard . One of them , a salesman ( Raymond Burr ) , seems to dispose of his nagging , invalid wife by chopping her up and removing her body in sectio... |
443,044 | 819,382 | 497,116 | 9 | Ignore it at peril . | As a dramatic actor Al Gore is no Lawrence Olivier . And as an inspirational speaker he's no Billy Graham . And he's not especially photogenic . To be perfectly honest , he has only three main virtues on display in this documentary . ( 1 ) He speaks slowly and clearly , even at his most hortatory . ( 2 ) He's obviously... |
441,683 | 819,382 | 38,000 | 9 | A Better War Movie | No one would argue that this 1945 war film was a masterpiece . How could any 1945 war film be a masterpiece ? And yet this is an extremely effective telling of a true story , that of Al Schmidt , blinded on Guadalcanal , as played by John Garfield , who spent days wearing a blindfold to capture the nuances of a blind p... |
443,422 | 819,382 | 11,922 | 9 | Inventive , amusing | Harold Loyd is pretty funny , and a good physical comic . Among Those Present deals with the contrast between high society and the rest of us . It seems to have been a more popular theme during the 1920s than it is now . ( Cf . , The Great Gatsby . ) Not that we don't have our share of contemporary explorations of the ... |
443,454 | 819,382 | 60,200 | 9 | One of the most successful comedies of its decade . | I caught this on its first run in Honolulu after spending two years in a place with no movie theaters . I laughed all the way through it . I was certain that enthusiasm was the result of all the previous deprivation , and some of it was , but the luster hasn't worn off this film on subsequent viewings . It's still funn... |
442,955 | 819,382 | 53,291 | 9 | Snappy and hilarious | It isn't the first time men were in drag on the screen and certainly not the last , but surely it must be the funniest example . I'll skip the plot and just make a few offhand observations . One is that the writers put a near-perfect polish on this script . They didn't simply throw gags and comic situations into the st... |
443,064 | 819,382 | 74,937 | 9 | One of Neil Simon's Funniest | Simon is good at barbed exchanges , as in most of " The Odd Couple . " But he has a tendency to get serious sometimes and it rarely works , even when the serious ones have some occasional good one-liners in them . His drama tends to be dull , and his comedies funny , especially in domestic contexts and when they're dia... |
443,277 | 819,382 | 92,400 | 9 | One of the Funniest Sitcoms Ever . | I may be warped but I find this series to be among the handful of enduring classics among all the TV sitcoms that have been aired . Full disclosure ? Others include " I Love Lucy , " " The Honeymooners , " " Mary Tyler Moore , " and " Bob Newhart . " To sharpen up the taxonomy , I'll put " Married With Children " toget... |
442,642 | 819,382 | 79,336 | 9 | Fred and Ginger without the boring plot | This hilarious movie reminds me of one of those 1930s black-and-white Astaire / Rogers musicals : silly and boring plots involving mixed identities or whatever , illuminated periodically by stunning songs and dances . Now take away the boring parts . Each time I see this movie it seems funnier than the last . The outra... |
442,402 | 819,382 | 31,679 | 9 | Civics for Dummies . | Boy , do we ever need a refresher course in the subject . 2006 has been quite a year , worth studying in some detail . Congress proposed a bill that would hike the minimum wage for the first time in almost ten years . ( Meanwhile , Congress had voted itself almost ten raises in the same period . ) Enemies of the minimu... |
441,690 | 819,382 | 32,551 | 10 | People That Live | The movie itself is generally recognized as about as good ( or great ) as you can get , especially considering that it was shot in 33 days . But it often gets nailed for two scenes , one absent from the film , the other changed drastically . No Rosasharn is not seen in the film nursing the dying old man from her swolle... |
443,026 | 819,382 | 41,959 | 10 | Don't Miss This One . | The perfect film is not yet with us but this is movie making at its zenith . It's hard to imagine how this film could be improved upon . It's both gripping AND original . Each image on the screen is indelible . I'll give one example . Joseph Cotton waiting for Orson Welles at the gigantic ferris wheel , his coat flappi... |
443,342 | 819,382 | 912,593 | 10 | How to Spread Democracy . | One of the interviewees muses that rebuilding Iraq would be difficult , that there were 500 ways we could go wrong and only 2 or 3 in which we could go right . " We didn't realize , " she concludes , " that we were going to go through all 500 . " Is this a Bush-bashing propaganda piece ? Not really . Bush rarely comes ... |
443,013 | 819,382 | 116,282 | 10 | Don't Forgo Fargo | Boy , is this a good movie . In its bare bones it is a crime drama but the Coen brothers constantly undercut the seriousness with a quirky irony . The acting , the script , and the direction lift the movie light years above most of the movies of its decade . The performances , for instance , everyone speaks with what p... |
441,835 | 819,382 | 74,119 | 10 | Superlative | I first read this story when it was serialized in Playboy , with neatly understated illustrations by Punchatz , one of America's premiers . I read the book too , after having kept one ear on the TV hearings . I couldn't follow any of it . I gathered that most of the pols involved were liars and cheats , but what else w... |
442,108 | 819,382 | 45,152 | 10 | About as Good as They Come . | A lot of people seem to gush over this picture - - " It's my favorite musical , " said one critic , and Kelly replied , " That's good to know . " Well , it's hard to believe in lists of best or worst things because everything is made up of several dimensions . Some are good and some are bad . Sometimes very bad . Nobod... |
442,765 | 819,382 | 98,769 | 10 | Landmark Series | I can't see any reason to go on at great length about this 9-part series . It's a technically revolutionary film . Burns and his colleagues , along with Errol Morris , have changed the nature of the documentary . Burns , working with old photos on glass plates , an unpromising base , the occasional talking head , and o... |
442,814 | 819,382 | 29,947 | 10 | Can't Give You Anything But Love . | Cary Grant is a quiet paleontologist in New York who has never seen anything except the inside of a museum . He's waiting anxiously for the arrival of the bone , the " intercostal clavicle , " that will enable him to finish his four-year reconstruction of a Brontosaurus skeleton . Meanwhile he's trying to coax a millio... |
442,767 | 819,382 | 62,765 | 10 | Sui generis | I don't know how this film can be criticized as " dated , " except in the most superficial sense of the word . It stands by itself . There hasn't been another movie quite like it , before or since . Essentially a straightforward tale of a policeman unraveling a gangster plot , it alternates between trouvee scenes that ... |
443,272 | 819,382 | 33,467 | 10 | Late Bloomer Endures - - Movie , not Director . | I don't know exactly what's left to say about " Citizen Kane " , about it's technical dazzle or the maturity of its plot , but it's interesting to note that its prominence gained height only gradually . At first , if not disregarded , it was mostly unnoticed , probably because William Randolph Hearst and his newspaper ... |
441,838 | 819,382 | 41,090 | 10 | Asymptote | If you think about the likelihood of something happening , you can quantify it . Something can be theoretically 100 % impossible , it can be 100 % certain , or it can be fifty-fifty ( such as the likelihood of getting " heads " when you flip a coin ) . The problem is that although we like to believe that likelihoods ca... |
442,270 | 819,382 | 40,416 | 10 | The best Hamlet ever - - so far . | I think it's safe to say this is the best Hamlet so far . Not that I've seen them all but it's hard to imagine how anything in this production could be much improved upon . The story , admittedly , is kind of dumb . Everybody since Samuel Johnson has been trying to figure out why Hamlet just didn't go ahead and kill Cl... |
443,001 | 819,382 | 84,855 | 10 | In Primis | This one really isn't to be missed , certainly among the best of the courtroom dramas . The acting . Well , first of all , nobody is bad . The most nearly negligible performance is by Wesley Addy , who at least looks the part of the elegant doctor and who is a competent actor . The other principals are outstanding . Ch... |
407,161 | 865,972 | 220,025 | 1 | Truly awful . | I'm really fed up with such movies like " Scream " , " I Know What You Did Last Summer " , " Urban Legend " or " School's Out " - these so-called horror flicks pose as a slashers , but they're nothing more than politically correct trash . " Schrei-denn ich werde dich toten ! " borrows unashamedly from American " Scream... |
407,735 | 865,972 | 122,603 | 1 | Truly abysmal . | Legion of Fire : Killer Ants ! is indeed one of the worst horror films ever made . It's so bad and stupid it has to be seen to be believed . The cast is horrible and the special effects are even worse . I ask the film-makers : what is scary in computer-animated ants ? The only good thing about this piece of crap is b... |
407,464 | 865,972 | 1,099,212 | 1 | The biggest load of teenybopper trash I have recently seen . | Handsome beautiful vampires with pale faces . I'm sure that sixteen or seventeen year old girlies are dreaming about meeting such enigmatic vampire presence as Edward Cullen . " Twilight " consists tons of annoying extreme close-ups of Edward and Bella faces and a lot of slow-motion moments . Robert Pattinson's perform... |
408,062 | 865,972 | 91,631 | 1 | Truly awful . | Henry Sala's " Nightmare Weekend " is a rotten piece of sludge from Troma . This is a juvenile , sloppy and stupid low-budget horror film about some teenage girls spending the weekend at a mansion . The professor's evil assistant lures the girls into a bizarre scheme to perform hideous experiments . Using a brain impla... |
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