An example of a movie review. negative.

A: Poor Ingrid suffered and suffered once she went off to Italy, tired of the Hollywood glamor treatment. First it was suffering the torments of a volcanic island in STROMBOLI, an arty failure that would have killed the career of a less resilient actress. And now it's EUROPA 51, another tedious exercise in soggy sentiment.

Nor does the story do much for Alexander KNOX, in another thankless role as her long-suffering husband who tries to comfort her after the suicidal death of their young son. At least this one has better production values and a more coherent script than STROMBOLI.

Bergman is still attractive here, but moving toward a more matronly appearance as a rich society woman. She's never able to cope over the sudden loss of her son, despite attempts by a kindly male friend. "Sometimes I think I'm going out of my mind," she tells her husband. A portentous statement in a film that is totally without humor or grace, but it does give us a sense of where the story is going.

Bergman is soon motivated to help the poor in post-war Rome, but being a social worker with poor children doesn't improve her emotional health and from thereon the plot takes a turn for the worse.

The film's overall effect is that it's not sufficiently interesting to make into a project for a major star like Bergman. The film loses pace midway through the story as Bergman becomes more and more distraught and her husband suspects that she's two-timing him. The story goes downhill from there after she nurses a street-walker through her terminal illness. The final thread of plot has her husband needing to place her for observation in a mental asylum.

Ingrid suffers nobly through it all (over-compensating for the loss of her son) but it's no use. Not one of her best flicks, to put it mildly.

Trivia note: If she wanted neo-realism with mental illness, she might have been better off accepting the lead in THE SNAKE PIT when it was offered to her by director Anatole Litvak!! It would have done more for her career than EUROPA 51.

Summing up: Another bleak indiscretion of Rossellini and Bergman.

An example of a movie review. negative.

A: It's interesting to see what the director tried to do with this film. But the problem is that it's not very good. There was nothing really original in the film and while the plot was well presented, the main characters were all a bit to shallow and you didn't bother for any of them.

Rather bland (and sometimes downright bad) photo leaves a bit to be desired but I guess you can't expect to much from people who are just doing a low budget film for the heck of it. It's unfair to review the film and compare it to other high-budget films. But alas, that is what one must do. On its own, it's not very good. And compared to others, it's still not very good. But it is not without its good points! I liked the plot. It was built up rather nicely and tied together well at the end. Sometimes in the really dark scenes, it managed to build up a creepy feeling as well.

However in the end the film fails to impress. The characters are pretty much non-existent and we don't care for any of them. Any of them might die, but it's possible to pinpoint the final "survivor" from very early on.

An example of a movie review. positive.

A:
We watched this on "The Wonderful World of Disney" on ABC last night, and I came to the conclusion that things must be tighter there at "the Mouse" than usual.

Since this movie only runs 74 minutes, and they had to pad it out to 2 hours of broadcast television time, they had, and I'm not making this up, commercial breaks that lasted 6 to 7 minutes. And during these commercial breaks, they had another advertisement in the guise of a "TV show" hosted by the oh-so-annoying Kelly Rippa that loudly proclaimed the magical wonders of "Cinderella 2: Dreams Come True".

Again and again, break after break, Disney took time out of the real movie to tell us, the loyal viewers, that we needed to get a copy of the sequel. Thank you, Disney, for doing us the service of creating a sequel to your beloved gem of a movie.

Anyway, all this commercialism and cash-register-ringing made it a difficult task to get into the actual movie of "Cinderella", because by the time the commercials were over, I had forgotten where the story had left off.

But of course, the original "Cinderella" still maintains its magic, and the story is still a good one, though we've all seen it countless times. It's a shame they had to cheapen it with all the marketing for what looks to be a lame follow-up.