Since I am a movie buff, I LOVE this book, and read it in bed! It's a good read for anyone wanting to know what kind of movies they would like to see. It's a lot better than anything Leonard Maltin has ever done, and it's also better than Roger Ebert's I hated, I hated, I HATED this movie, which is good, but it contains mostly B-movies.
Best Reference Book for the Movie Lover
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 20 years ago
I have loved this series since first discovering it while working at a Video Rental outlet. It has an exhaustive volume of movies in it and has a beautifully multisearch index. It makes trying to find out where you had seen an actor/actress before a breeze. It doesn't try to be a big novel but reference guide like a dictionary or encyclopedia. I have also found that I agree with more of the ratings of movies in this book than any other. BUY THIS. It is worth it. I agree that it compliments the Internet Movie Database perfectly but is more portable.
lots of info and fun too
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 20 years ago
This movie guide seems to have info on a whole lot of movies. The reviews are not especially long or in-depth (they're about two paragraphs for most movies, longer for major or important films), but they give you enough info to know what the movie is like and I find that MOST of the time I agree with what they have to say. There may be some movies it doesn't cover, but I spent some time trying to think of ones that wouldn't be in it, and it wasn't easy.But, to me the best part of this book is that it's fun to read. The bad movies get slammed in a creative fashion (in one movie, they "ride the one joke premise like a rented Ferrari"), and there are jokes, etc. And in addition to indexes of actors, directors, etc., they have a list of categories, some of which are pretty specific and some of which are entertaining, like "Korean War", "Farming", "Phobias", "Stolen from Europe" (American remakes of European films), "Tennis", "Venice", "Scared 'Chuteless" (Skydiving without one piece of important equipment), etc.I also have the electronic version (for the Palm handheld) made by pocketsensei.com, which is nice because the actual paper book is the size of phone book and not too portable. The Palm version, of course, fits in your pocket, and I take my Palm with me most of the time, so I can refer to it while I am in Blockbuster or at Best Buy to buy a video or whatever. (You can read the back of the DVD box, but since 100% of them say the movie is awesome, that's pretty worthless.)
The best movie guide out at the moment
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 20 years ago
This is the best movie guide available today, not so much because of its reviews (they're as generally reliable but opinionated as any other guide) but because of the massive amount of indexes, which go way beyond other guides. Definitely worth purchasing as a physical companion of sorts to the online Internet Movie Database (imdb.com).
The bible of all movie review books
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 20 years ago
I bought this book back in the late 90's and have continually bought new versions to update my collection. I use it so much I refer to it as the bible. I love this book and would recommend it for anyone. The references are easy to use and you can look up movies, actors, directors, genre, etc. I highly recommend it!
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