Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen

by Leonard Maltin

Book Overview

Popular film critic and esteemed cinema historian Leonard Maltin offers a fresh look at underappreciated screen gems in Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen. From the over 17,000 entries in his definitive yearly collection Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, Maltin has selected great movies that will appeal to serious film buffs, but that may have fallen through the cracks. A must-have reference source for the bookshelf of movie connoisseurs...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061732346
• ISBN13: 9780061732348
• Release Date: February 2010
• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Best in show !

This book is picture perfect ! Concise, user-friendly - genre organized. Use it before your next visit to the rental store or to build a queue in your rent-by-mail movie service. Fabulous with popcorn !

Great to know!

I've only seen a handful of these movies, so I'm happy to have many more to look forward to.

Great way to find movies that slid under the radar

I have used this book to discover movies I'd never heard of. Most are quite good. Some are kind of odd. Many of them have huge stars. It's interesting how many movies don't get promoted, or seen in theaters.

151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Leonard Maltin (Harper Studio)

With Oscar season upon us, we thought it would be a good time to take a look at some of the movies you won't be hearing about on the telecast. Between all the Avatars and Clooneys of the world, there are a host of smaller movies (or box-office duds) that are well deserving of your time and attention. Or so says film critic Leonard Maltin, who would probably be a good judge, as he probably sees about a dozen movies a week in his job as a journalist and TV personality. Maltin's latest book singles out films from the last 20 years that, unless you are an extreme movie aficionado, chances are that most of these selections never hit your radar. FIlms like "The Door in the Floor" (Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Mimi Rogers, Bijou Phillips) or "The Great Buck Howard" (Tom Hanks, John Malkovich, Griffin Dunne, etc.) may not have made a big splash at your local cinema, but they are among Maltin's picks as key flicks to go back and find. (Nearly every major actor is represented from Robert DeNiro to Meryl Streep to Leo DiCaprio and all the rest.) The films are divided into roughly three categories; mainstream studio fare, foreign and independent films that often struggle for attention here and a few choice gems from the first half of cinematic history. Maltin rightly focuses most of his light on movies from the last 20 years. (As there are already many books that highlight pictures from the golden age of cinema.) Of course, it's hard to tell just how great the book is without sampling a host of the films that Maltin singles out for a revisit, but next time you are at Blockbuster or on Netflix, keep this book handy and see if one of Maltin's picks might sound worthwhile even while it would pass your normal purview. Just be ready to fire up that old VHS machine in the garage, as many of these gems have never made the leap to DVD.

"You make up your own truth." - Memento

I sat down expecting to quickly skim this book and I read every word. It shouldn't by now, but it always surprises me when I realize how good a film critic and historian (as opposed to a thumbs-up thumbs down reviewer) Leonard Maltin is. Lately, the film writers I learn the most from are Maltin and David Thomson. I've seen a few of the off-the-wall movies in this book (Tristram Shandy, Peter's Friends, Millions, Innocent Blood, Bubba Ho-tep, Brick, and the documentaries [...] and Word Wars) and I agree that they're intriguing. (I'm glad Maltin includes documentaries--I find myself watching a lot more of them than I used to.) A stunning movie was Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which mixes Cold War politics, music, and gender reassignment. Director Christopher Nolan's first film--Following--is better than any of his comic-book movies and at least as good as Memento. (Nolan is a perfect example of the kind of filmmaker that Jason Horsley writes about in his book Dogville vs. Hollywood: The Independents and the Hollywood Machine--someone who starts making personal stories about real people, then goes on to do remakes of foreign films and blockbuster trash.) So this book has made me rethink seeing movies I already rejected for some reason or another (like American Dreamz or Hidalgo).