Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: Half a dozen short stories of varying interest enlighten us about life in Finland. These stories are interwoven and each contains a scene in which a sonic boom is heard. This indicates that the events depicted happen at the same time.

The film begins with a bungy jump which promises some excitement but the early stories are quite low key. The film improves so stick with it. Two broken marriages in stories that follow provide plenty of drama while a scene in a hospital gives us a terminally ill patient begging for pain relief. The last moments with his wife are both convincing and moving.

While the various scenes of family life take place in Finland, the themes are of a general nature wherever you happen to live.

Collections of short stories are rarely as satisfying as a good tense 90-minute drama.

Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: I saw most of the episodes of RMFTM as a teenager on "Cliffhanger Theater" running after midnight on a local station some years ago, and then again when Mystery Science Theatre riffed on it in the early 90's. Time has not been kind to it.

I can certainly make allowances for the special effects, which were quite impressive for a low budget 50's serial (IMO Commando Cody's flying scenes were better than George Reeves/Superman's in his TV show). And I can also make allowances for the ahem, "acting", and fight choreography -. except for the guy who plays the ruler of the Moon Men. He is incredibly miscast. He looks and acts like the fellow who comes to fix your plumbing, not the despotic ruler of an alien race. Even the corny dialog works all right - everyone rattles off their lines like strings of firecrackers, with no wasted time or pauses for things like "thought" or "introspection". Since everyone does this, the viewer finds it immersive after awhile, and even to my modern sensibilities, it doesn't bother much.

What really irritates me is the writing and the plotting. I'm not talking about the sunny weather on the moon, or baking soda powered rocket ships, or a flying suit that has controls labeled "up/down" and "fast/slow". I'm not even bothered by the cheesiness of the resolutions to the cliffhangers that end each chapter. I'm talking about the fact that our supposed heroes are dumber than fence posts and have no cumulative memory. And by the fact that although that the dialog clips along like an express train, the plot goes through the same motions again and again.

Dig it: Commando Cody and his pal are the spearhead of a top secret hi tech science lab charged with protecting Earth (or at least the USA) against an insidious alien invasion. But his office has no guards or security checkpoints. They don't even have locks on the front doors. So the bad guys walk RIGHT IN and beat the crap out of the Cody and his staff ...not once (perhaps understandable) but SEVERAL times. They even kidnap his female assistant on the second try. And they never get any smarter. To further prove my point, allow me to point out the way that Cody jumps in his flying suit and flies around getting into trouble and never actually seems to succeed in catching anyone. He does this over and over and over. Cody also flies his ship to the Moon (the woman assistant comes along to cook), stays for about 30 seconds and immediately turns around and comes back. Cody captures one of the Atomic Ray guns...and immediately loses it again to the bad guys because he couldn't be bothered to lock it up. And so on.

And you would think that if Cody's efforts were so vital to saving the USA from the Moon Men, that he might ask for a few soldiers with carbines, a few helicopters and a tank or two to back him up, instead of just working with the local police all the time. This was supposed to be a military operation, but they act like it's another episode of "Gangbusters".

It's all rather hard to stomach. I appreciate that the creators were severely limited in the scope of their story by budget and time constraints...and I appreciate that Cody is actually a reasonably tough hombre (even though he loses half of his fistfights). But I just can't help yelling "DOOR! LOCK THE DOOOOR!!" when the gangsters simply walk into his lab, or try to blow up the ship and there are NO security measures at the landing site in place...not even a fence (!).

Still, it's OK. Of the three Republic serials I've watched, "Phantom Creeps" had a better plot, and "Undersea Kingdom" had more atmosphere (hah!) and a better hero than "Radar Men", but it's an OK time-waster.

BTW...why "Radar" men? They didn't use radar, they used Atomic Ray Guns. Shouldn't the title have been "Atomic Ray Gun Men From The Moon?"

Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: 'The Last Wave' is far more than the sum of its parts. It's not merely a disaster film, not simply an exploration into Australian Aboriginal spirituality, and certainly more than a simple court drama. Writer/Director Peter Weir manages to take these elements to the next level to produce a truly effective and thought-provoking film with the same eerie atmosphere he gave to 'Picnic At Hanging Rock' two years earlier, that you will continue to remember years later.

When lawyer David Burton (Chamberlain) is called to defend Chris Lee (Gulpilil) over the death of an Aboriginal for which he may or may not be directly responsible, he finds himself not merely struggling to get the truth from Lee, but making sense of what he hears when it does come. As with the Aboriginal belief that there are two worlds - the everyday and the Dreamtime, the truth exists on two completely different levels, with ramifications more disastrous than Burton could ever have imagined.

No doubt the reason why 'Picnic At Hanging Rock' is better remembered is because of its enduring mystery. We are led along the same path but forced to find answers for ourselves. In 'The Last Wave', we can piece everything together by the end of the film. However, even with all the information, we have to choose how much of it we want to believe, because the film takes us beyond the borders of our normal realities.

On the production side, Weir uses his budget to great effect, progressively building a sense of doom in everything from soft lighting, to heavy rain, to good use of sound. The incidental music is unobtrusive, never trying to be grandiose. Richard Chamberlain manages to convey the bafflement the audience would doubtless feel as he tries to unravel the mystery. David Gulpilil excellently portrays a man trapped between two worlds, wanting to do the right thing, but afraid because he already knows the ending.

Put all these things together, and you have a perfect example of why David Weir is a familiar name in cinema thirty years on. Strongly recommended.

Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here:
Follow-up to 1973's far better "Cleopatra Jones" has statuesque black actress Tamara Dobson returning to her signature role as chic, super-tough narcotics agent, here busting a heroin ring in Hong Kong. Cross-pollination of blaxploitation action-flick and kung-fu B-movie is fun at the outset but eventually flags. The shoot-out finale is right off the assembly-line, and Dobson herself seems less energetic than before (she's still sexy, and she puts a unique spin on her comically-stilted dialogue, but these surroundings may have been too much of one thing for her--she's jaded). Stella Stevens plays the villainess this time; she's good, but can't match Shelley Winters in the predecessor. ** from ****