An example of a movie review. positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A: Excellent film that reveals how people are connected to the taken for granted, ordinary beads exchanged during Mardi Gras. The film is much more than a commentary on globalization. In fact, it humanizes the workers in China, the owner of the factory, the bead distributor in New Orleans, and even the revelers in New Orleans. What stands out the most is the director's ability to tell a tricky story with complicated details in such a simple and seductive way. His amazing access to the factory is another aspect that's intriguing and I only wish I knew how he got inside. It's a beautiful story without sentimentality or guilt associated with it, and the conclusion provides hope without leaving people feeling alienated.
Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: One of the great things about many of the superb Chinese movies you can find, if you are lucky, in the video stores, is they are very accurate retellings of actual, true stories. Farewell, my Concubine, The Emperor and the Assassin and this movie are perfect examples. The film makers take a true story and work hard to accurately create a movie without compromising the facts for dramatic or commercial convenience -- the hallmark of much Hollywood, and especially Disney films.

In this story we follow the later years of an famous local street performer dubbed the King of Masks for his mastery of Sichuan Change Art. Along an having lost his only son many years earlier, he searches to find a male heir to carry on his rare and dying art in a society that forbids females to have such work. Master Wang is sold a son by a slave trader. All is well as he joyfully prepares to pass down his art. But the son eventually is found out to be a girl. From there, the story get very interesting, with a good performance by Master Liang of the Sichuan Opera -- a regional operatic style related to Peking Opera. Fans of Farewell My Concubine should look carefully at Master Liang's portrayal of a male playing the female role in Chinese Opera. It may help them come to understand that the players of these female roles were probably not homosexuals or castrati, but people who have be so psychologically conditioned as to be totally unaware of their own sexuality.
Problem: Write a positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer: I wanted to see Sarah Buffy on the big screen, so I first bought tickets and then checked the reviews at IMDb. I worried about seeing a bad movie. Well, I had fun watching the movie. Some parts, which obviously were meant to be scary, were actually quite humoristic, almost as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I don't consider this a bad movie. It's not a great movie either. Just a rather well made horror movie. It does not rely heavily on special effects, but on camera angles, acting, music. In my opinion, the acting was OK. Sarah did a very good job, quite convincing. The other actors were definitely not bad either, I liked Yoko.

The sets are nice (and I don't care that the sets are the exact same ones that were used in the Japanese original).

The scary moments were often predictable. But not always. I have seen quite some horror, and did not expect to be scared now, but it happened at least twice. Nice.

The movie had some nice scenes that were almost original, like the trails of rubbish, the simple special effects for he ghosts, the eyes of the boy, the cat that made eery noises, the gurgling of the dead boy and his mother.

Don't go if you want to see Sarah in another Buffy episode, because it is very different from her Buffy work, much more serious. Don't go if you only want to see movies that gather Oscar nominations. It's a good horror movie, enough suspense. I gave it a 7.
Problem: OPTIONS:
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- positive positive
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Answer: Fraulein Doktor is as good a demonstration as any of how the once great film industry in Western Europe has declined in the past 40 years. Then, in the late 60s, while the big Hollywood studios were on the ropes, Italy,France and England were turning out movies to fill the void left by Hollywood's decline. There were the James Bond pictures (Doctor No was a surprise hit in the USA, it was first released at the Century theater chain in NYC with a 99 cent afternoon admission price), the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns (with A Fistful of Dollars released by a distributor that never paid the Italian producers a dime)and French crime movies that usually went to art houses, with exceptions like The Sicilian Clan. And there were European co-productions like Doctor Zhivago and, of course, Fraulein Doktor. With its big budget for the time, and the world talent involved, Fraulein Doktor was good enough that viewers still remember the movie decades later.

Kenneth More, playing a British intelligence officer, has a line in Fraulein Doktor where he tells a caught spy to either talk or he will play the Wall Game. The wall being opposite a firing squad, with little chance of the spy winning the game. That sort of cynical attitude played well across national borders, in the Vietnam War era of 1969.

The steamy scenes between Suzy Kendall and Capucine probably did not damage these performers' chances at getting parts in Hollywood movies, Hollywood studios were in the process of shedding their overseas distribution and production businesses. Fox would no longer co-produce films like The Sicilian Clan, Columbia wouldn't distribute films like Belmondo's The Night Caller. MGM went even further, cutting almost all film production, selling its chain of theaters in India for the value of the land underneath and unloading its Borehamwood studio facilty as Kerkorian looted the studio to raise money for building his casino in Las Vegas (where a Bally casino gift shop sold MGM memorabilia at giveaway prices, stuff left over from the auction of MGM's prop warehouses).

Paramount distributed Fraulein Doktor, but Gulf and Western's Charles Bludhorn, who had taken over the company and canned the studio's aged Board of Directors, unloaded the studio's film library to Universal (as I recall) and really became interested in movies after production chief Robert Evans started turning out one hit after another. But that was in the 70s. Fraulein Doktor with its lesbian scene was buried, with cut versions of the movie showing up on local stations through the 80s.

Kenneth More was usually typecast as a bumbling guy when he was older, especially in the BBC detective series Father Brown. When he was younger, as in the British movie Titanic, he played his standard reserved British officer. In Fraulein Doktor, he had a chance to be a lot tougher than usual, as I recall. It would be nice to see if my memory of this movie is accurate, about his role and, of course, those cavalry horses wearing gas masks and protective covers riding into battle. That was some scene, and Alberto Lattuada showed he was some director, helming this World War I espionage movie, where the money spent on production values really shows up on the screen.
An example of a movie review. negative (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A:
What if Somerset Maugham had written a novel about a coal miner who decided to search for transcendental enlightenment by trying to join a country club? If he had, he could have called it The Razor's Edge, since the Katha-Upanishad tells us, "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard." But Maugham decided to stick with the well-bred class, and so we have Darryl F. Zanuck's version of Larry Darrell, recently returned from WWI, carefully groomed, well connected in society and determined to find himself by becoming a coal miner.

Or, as Maugham tells us, "This is the young man of whom I write. He is not famous. It may be that when at last his life comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on this earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. Yet it may be that the way of life he has chosen for himself may have an ever growing influence over his fellow men, so that, long after his death, perhaps, it will be realized that lived in this age a very remarkable creature."

The Razor's Edge has all of Zanuck's cultural taste that money could buy. It's so earnest, so sincere...so self-important. As Larry goes about his search for wisdom, working in mines, on merchant ships, climbing a Himalayan mountain to learn from an ancient wise man, we have his selfish girl friend, Isabel, played by Gene Tierney, his tragic childhood chum played by Anne Baxter, the girlfriend's snobbish and impeccably clad uncle played by Clifton Webb, and Willie Maugham himself, played by Herbert Marshall, taking notes. The movie is so insufferably smug about goodness that the only thing that perks it up a bit is Clifton Webb as Elliot Templeton. "If I live to be a hundred I shall never understand how any young man can come to Paris without evening clothes." Webb has some good lines, but we wind up appreciating Clifton Webb, not Elliot Templeton.

Zanuck wanted a prestige hit for Twentieth Century when he bought the rights to Maugham's novel. He waited a year until Tyrone Power was released from military service. He made sure there were well-dressed extras by the dozens, a score that sounds as if it were meant for a cathedral and he even wrote some of the scenes himself. The effort is as self-conscious as a fat man wearing a rented tux. Despite Hollywood's view of things in The Razor's Edge, I can tell you that for most people hard work doesn't bring enlightenment, just weariness and low pay.

After nearly two-and-a-half hours, we last see Larry carrying his duffle bag on board a tramp steamer in a gale. He's going to work his way back to America from Europe with a contented smile on his face. "My dear," Somerset Maugham says to Isabel at the same time in an elaborately decorated parlor, "Larry has found what we all want and what very few of us ever get. I don't think anyone can fail to be better, and nobler, kinder for knowing him. You see, my dear, goodness is after all the greatest force in the world...and he's got it!" Larry and the audience both need a healthy dose of Dramamine.

Maugham, lest we forget, was a fine writer of plays, novels, essays and short stories. To see how the movies could do him justice, watch the way some of his short stories were brought to the screen in Encore, Trio and Quartet. And instead of wasting time with Larry Darrell, spend some time with Lawrence Durrell. The Alexandria Quartet is a good read.