Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: Battlestar Gallactica was so great because it had tight writing, a great look, excellent actors, and interesting stories... AND yeah, had hot men and women running around in and out of uniform.

Caprica was just lazy. Lazy writing. Actors smoking up a storm to give them "character." Outdoor sequences that ruin the feeling of being somewhere else (yes, that is a Ford Focus sitting in the background). Lots and lots of teenage angst. LOTS of gyrating naked women (but in the background. Which I'm sure will be cut for the series) and a token view of some men in towels. None of the actors except Polly Walker took my attention at all. At an hour and a half, I was still wondering when it was going to be over.

So what exactly is it that's supposed to bring me back? The science fiction? It's awfully light on that. The actors? Besides Polly Walker's fine turn, there isn't much interesting being done here. There aren't even any "hotties" in the cast, except for maybe Esai, although for the younger set he's pretty old, since he's over 25.

I loved BSG. I was skeptical when I heard about Caprica, and unfortunately, I think I'm right. I predict a very short run for it as a series unless they really sharpen their pencils over at SciFi and get to work making this more than The OC on another planet.
Problem: Write a positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer: Prolific and highly influential filmmaker Martin Scorsese examines a selection of his favorite American films grouped according to three different types of directors: the director as an illusionist: D.W. Griffith or F. W. Murnau, who created new editing techniques among other changes that made the appearance of sound and color later step forward; the director as a smuggler: filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk, Samuel Fuller, and mostly Vincente Minnelli, directors who used to disguise rebellious messages in their films; and the director as iconoclast: those filmmakers attacking civil observations and social hang-ups like Orson Welles, Erich von Stroheim, Charles Chaplin, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Kubrick, and Arthur Penn.

He shows us how the old studio system in Hollywood was, though oppressive, the way in which film directors found themselves progressing the medium because of how they were bound by political and financial limitations. During his clips from the movies he shows us, we not only discover films we've never seen before that pique our interest but we also are made to see what he sees. He evaluate his stylistic sensibilities along with the directors of the sequences themselves.

The idea of a film canon has been reputed as snobbish, hence some movie fans and critics favor to just make "lists." However, canon merely denotes "the best" and supporters of film canon argue that it is a valuable activity to identify and experience a select compilation of the "best" films, a lot like a greatest hits tape, if just as a beginning direction for film students. All in all, one's experience has shown that all writing about film, including reviews, function to construct a film canon. Some film canons can definitely be elitist, but others can be "populist." As an example, the Internet Movie Database's Top 250 Movies list includes many films included on several "elitist" film canons but also features recent Hollywood blockbusters at which many film "elitists" scoff, like The Dark Knight, which presently mingles in the top ten amidst the first two Godfather films, Schindler's List and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the fluctuation of similar productions further down such as Iron Man, Sin City, Die Hard, The Terminator and Kill Bill: Vol. 2. Writer Scorsese's Taxi Driver Paul Schrader has straightforwardly referred to his canon as "elitist" and contends that this is positive.

Scorsese is never particularly vocal at all about his social and political ideologies, but when we see this intense and admittedly obsessive history lesson on the birth and growth of American cinema in both ideological realms, we see that there is really no particular virtue in either elitism or populism. Elitism concentrates all attention, recognition and thus power on those deemed outstanding. That discrimination could easily lead to self-indulgence much in the vein of the condescending work of Jean-Luc Godard or the overrationalization of the production practices of a filmmaker like Michael Haneke. Yet populism invokes a belief of representative freedom as being only the assertion of the people's will. As has been previously asserted about the all-encompassing misconceptions the people have about cinema, populism could be the end of the potential power and impact of cinema. One can only continue seeing films, because it is a vital social and metaphysical practice. And that's what Martin Scorsese spends nearly four hours here trying to tell us, something which can't be told without being seen first-hand.
Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here:
I saw once No Man's Land (1987) - IMDB link http://us.imdb.com/Title?0093638 - and found it ok. The film is about a guy who steals only Porsches. Gone in Sixty Seconds comes 13 years after and adds nothing to it. In fact, it has a lot of scenes that are worthless. And the ending is very, very bad.

The Sphinx has a magnetic screen presence that should have been better used...