WSG Newsletter: Movie Reviews

Issue: August 28, 2002

Updated January 5, 2004

There can hardly be a question about a movie that can't be answered through the Internet. Film buffs and movie hounds can check for cast, credits, and plots; read the reviews by critics and film goers; view trailers and clips; and get filmographies for directors and stars. In this newsletter, we look at a few good sources to help us follow up on a movie seen or consider the next film to pick.

Basic Data

Internet Movie Database - IMDb (www.imdb.com) has been years in development and now holds an enormous collection of information about films from around the world. It grew out of a Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies started in the early 1990s. Volunteers mounted the Web site and renamed it the Internet Movie Database. In 1998 Amazon bought it, providing funds for more features and redesign.

All visitors can search but subscribers (registration is free) can also participate in the message boards (Oscar Buzz, Goofs, Critics choices and many other topics), vote on movies, keep a my-movie list, and submit information and corrections.

IMDb offers a full tour of the site for newcomers. The section titled Which Classes to Take has tips for tracking down movies, people, and also TV shows.

When you just need to check details on a film, this is the database to use. it has over 250,000 titles. These may be browsed by year (all the way back to 1891), by genre, language, country, keywords, stars and a few other categories. Information kept on a film includes dates, cast and crew, plot line, and readers' rating and comments. Independent films are featured on their own page. The best approach is to search on title or actor and make use of some of the indexes to view by year, genre, or keyword. For example, what was the name of the film where John Malkovich travels across deserts in Africa?

IMDb Pro is a for-fee version of the service for people in the industry.

Portal

CinemaSpot (www.cinemaspot.com) provides one-stop surfing to lists of the best films, review sites, people, genres, and references. There are also feature articles and answers to "you asked for it". A quarterly newsletter has updates to film resources. Great starting point for all your questions.

Reviews

There are several excellent sites that index reviews that have been published or posted to the Web.

Rotten Tomatoes (www.rottentomatoes.com) delivers reviews from the media and online film societies. It claims to have more than 87,000 titles and 200,000 reviews. Rotten Tomatoes has the cast and crew, a synopsis, link to the official site, and - of course - the reviews. Based on those reviews, the tomatometer will rate a film as fresh (6 out of 10 or higher overall rating) or rotten.

We can find the Malkovich movie, The Sheltering Sky from 1990, quickly but there are only 7 reviews - not enough for Rotten Tomatoes to rate it. The reviews are picked from sources like Washington Post, Chicago Sun Times, Bad Movie Night.

Rather amazingly, Dogma, a film of dysfunction about two fallen angels, received a Fresh rating based on 89 reviews. Chris Vognar of the Dallas Morning News is quoted as saying "Dogma may very well be the best bad movie of the year (2001)"

The Tomato Picker can help in choosing a movie by genre, rating, era and decade, person and plot keywords. For dramas from the 1960s the meter ranks Cool Hand Luke and The Hustler (Paul Newman was in both) as among the very best.

ScreenIt.com has entertainment reviews to help parents screen the movies and videos their children see.

A husband and wife team began this in 1996. They do a very detailed assessment of each movie against fifteen categories that include alcohol and drugs, blood and gore, frightening scenes, guns and weapons, sex and nudity, violence. Ratings are from None to Extreme and all instances of the offensive material are noted. As well they write up a quick take on the movie, a synopsis of the plot, and comments on the cast as role models. All comments concerning suitability for young people (up to age 17) are on one page, and on another there is the reviewer's own "take" on the artistic merit.

Road to Perdition, an example, is heavy to extreme on all categories related to violence and profanity, but the reviewers award it an 8.5 out of 10 for performance, writing, and direction.

Metacritic (www.metacritic.com) was set up in 1999 by three movie fans as a place "where movie fans like us could easily find the most important reviews for each new movie at a glance". In 2002 it was nominated for a Webby Award in the Film category.

The movies and videos are recent releases. Being John Malkovich (1999) is covered but not Sheltering Sky (1990).

The profile on a movie is well developed and includes a metascore derived from the reviews. The current film Simone about a digitally created actress received a mediocre 44. Links to the reviews are arranged in order of their warmth. The reviews are obtained from many - and maybe all - the top reviewers in North America, among them the Globe and Mail, New York Times, Slate, Salon, Reel Reviews. Users of Metacritic may also vote and comment. The search engine is adequate for searching on a name or title.

This is an excellent resource for deciding on the next video to rent or movie to go to. It also has a release calendar of dates of upcoming releases to the movie theatre.

ifilm (www.ifilm.com) was the People's Choice for the 2002 Webby Award in film - a site mainly devoted to trailers and clips of movies, videos, and even commercials. Content is organized into channels for action, animation, comedy, drama, sci-fi. There is some basic information about the film - but the emphasis is on streaming video to Windows Media Player and Real Player.

The Movie Review Query Engine (http://www.mrqe.com/) makes finding reviews easy. One can start from prepared lists: recent releases, American Film Institute's selection of top 100 films in various categories, Cannes Festivals 2000 - 2002, and Academy Awards 2000 - 2002; or directly search the 28,000+ titles.

MRQE crawls sites that write reviews. Coverage is international: Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and Argentina - there may be more. Among the Canadian sources are the Globe and Mail and La Presse.

While the bulk of the indexed reviews are about recent films, there are reviews of the classics to pick up comment on older films - The Thin Man (1934) and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). Searching is strictly on title - names of people won't bring back results. For more search options MRQE users are directed to the IMDb.

Yahoo has a movie center- movies.yahoo.com. The home page lists top movies, features clips of new movies, and reports on the news and gossip. People in the United States can also find showtimes by zip code. Profiles of recent movies (probably 1998 and later) are extensive with a plot outline, cast and credits, and critics reviews. There may be related links to trailers and related web sites. Older movies will have just the description and maybe user reviews. YM has a little information about On the Waterfront (1954) with Marlon Brando but not All About Eve (1950) with Bette Davis.

Critic's reviews are gathered together and an overall rating derived. Yahoo's critic list gives a C+ to Simone - the number of reviews is less than that at MetaCritic.

Yahoo Movies is also home to Greg's Previews of Upcoming Movies. Greg Dean Schmitz reviews new movies in advance, listing cast and plot information. It's a bit of news and gossip. In late December 2003 he previewed The Stepford Wives, yet another film with Nicole Kidman, due for release in June 2004. All of Greg's Previews may be browsed by title, date, genre, director, actor etc. Archives go back to 1998.

Favourite Sources

While these mega-sites of reviews are useful, we may prefer to go to a single source where we know the writers and rely on their assessment. This is best for keeping tabs on reviews of new releases.

The Globe and Mail brings together film reviews, movies on TV, and various comment on movies at http://www.globeandmail.com/tv/movies/. Early in the year they added Movie Lookup for quick access to films reviewed this week and for searching the database of older reviews. The Film Friday newsletter has the latest movie news and reviews.

The New Yorker is at long last online. Some articles from the current issue can be read on the Web including The Current Cinema (http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/). The New Yorker review is always thoughtful and substantial. David Denby and Anthony Lane are two of the regular reviewers. The full New Yorker reviews aren't archived - you have to catch them in the week. However, the mini-reviews are available (January 2004) in The Film File (http://www.newyorker.com/online/filmfile/?040112onremo_index). This has 2,000 mini-reviews dating from 1990. Added Jan 5, 2004

The New York Times's Movies section (http://movies.nytimes.com/pages/movies/index.html) features current releases on the front page along with critics' picks from three reviewers. NYT also makes available 20 years of reviews from its archives. Search by title, year, or genre. There are several best-of lists. As well, NYT Movies has DVD and Videos. Stay up to date on new releases with the Movies Newsletter. Added Jan 5, 2004

Salon is another favourite for reviews of films. (http://www.salon.com/ent/index.html) Stephanie Zacharek gave thumbs down to Road to Perdition as a "dreary art-house flick" but loved the "glorious, tender, literary adaptation" of A.S. Byatt's Possession. Some earlier reviews and other comment about film can be found through the Directory page (dir.salon.com) either under Movies or Film.

Lastly, Roger Ebert has his own space at the Chicago Sun Times (http://www.suntimes.com/index/ebert.html) with current reviews, essays, and the Ebert Archive of reviews back to 1985.

Watching these sites for new reviews can be easily done using web monitoring services like WatchThatPage or Infominder. Both are easy to set up and will notify you of changes on the pages you select. (See sidebar.)

It's A Wrap

We don't have to wrack our brains for a name or title, or spends hours at a search engine trying to find a review that will explain a movie, or for that matter waste time watching movies we discover we dislike. The Movie Database can quickly put us on track to find who in played in what. Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes can give us ratings and reviews of movies before we go to see them, or help us create a to-get list from the video store. For current releases monitoring a favourite news or arts source will deliver the latest views of the New Yorker, New York Times or other source of movie critics. It's a wrap.

Newsletter by Gwen Harris who loves to go to the movies.