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

A: Water Lilies is a well-made first film from France about young female sexuality and friendship. Sciamma works with specialized, slightly sanitized material that is as off-putting to some as it is alluring to others. The film focuses exclusively on three middle-class teenage girls in a tidy new Paris suburb. Their lives revolve around a big indoor swimming pool where two of the three are part of a synchronized water ballet team.

Such distractions as parents, siblings, work and school have been neatly excised from the equation. The central sensibility belongs to the attractively sullen but skinny Marie (Pauline Acquart), who is not on the team, but thinks she would like to be. Marie worships Floriane (Adele Haenel), an alluring blonde and team standout whom the boys are after. This takes Marie away from her former best friend, also a member of the water ballet team, the somewhat plump Anne (Louise Blachere). Being less special Anne is more truly accessible to the boys. Floriane, like this film, promises a bit more then she truly offers. Marie has the more essential quality for a teenage girl: she suffers inwardly. Flroiane doesn't so much suffer as jump into situations and then bolt.

Marie is dazzled by the glamor of the water ballet as well as Floriane. Floriane takes advantage of this to make Marie first her slave and a cover for her assignations, then, lacking any other friends, her confidante. All the other girls think Floriane a slut, an illusion she encourages in the men and boys she teases, because it leads them on. She suffers the pretty girl's fate of being not a person but an object, and she can't resist the validation the boys give her by wanting to kiss her and bed her, but she doesn't really care about any of them and knows her involvements with them are a trap. Enlisting Marie to act as her pal so her (unseen) mother won't know she's going out to meet boys, she also gets Marie to rescue her from the boys later. It looked the opposite at first, but Floriane needs Marie as much as Marie thinks she needs her. Anne is left with her discomfort with her body and a desire to get laid that's earthier and more real than the other girls'.

Keeping all external context at bay, Sciamma can highlight subtle shifts in the delicate equation of the three girls' goals and interactions. On the other hand the film's water madness, which includes lots of showering and spitting as well as underwater swimming shots, makes it feel completely airless at times and some of its 95 minutes do not pass so quickly. Luckily the film has a sense of humor and lets the trio sometimes forget their ever-present goals and avoidances and just do silly, pointless girl things. It's the offbeat moments that give the film life; too bad in a way that there aren't more of them. But Sciamma has the courage of her obsessions and what remains as one walks out of the theater is the personalities and their dynamics. Along the way of course it is pleasant to watch the swimming and to gaze at the girls, who understandably love to gaze at themselves.

There's no great revelation or drama on the way, but things get a bit more interesting when it emerges that Marie doesn't just admire but truly desires Floriane and is jealous of her boyfriends--whom Floriane always stops before they go all the way. In a typical irony of this kind of plot, Floriane actually decides she wants to have her first real sex with Marie--but Marie is the one who holds off, because she knows it won't have the significance to Floriane that it will have to her. When it happens, it's a timid, mechanical affair. Meanwhile Anne has a huge crush on Francois (Warren Jacquin), a male swimmer, but of course he is after Floriane. Boys are not an element that's been subtracted and there always seem to be several dozen ready at poolside or on the dance floor, but they are just bodies and faces, available studs.
Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: Admirably odd, though mean-spirited comedy-drama about a strange young man who hopes to fly like a bird through the Houston Astrodome. Robert Altman-directed quasi-comedy with eccentric characters is so overloaded with weirdos that it starts to creak early on from the weight. Some of the cinematography is evocative, Shelley Duvall is a stitch in her debut as a tour guide, and Sally Kellerman looks every inch the glamourpuss as Bud Cort's vision of a "mother bird" (imagine Altman and producer Lou Adler explaining that role to her!). In the lead, Bud Cort is--once again, after "Harold & Maude"--a true original; not off-putting like, say, Michael J. Pollard, Cort manages to be geeky, wacky and inoffensive, a tough act to pull off. Unfortunately, this is one of Altman's misfires. He can put together a cast and a showpiece like no one else, but let him get fired up with some misguided inspiration and he spirals downward. ** from ****
Problem: Write a negative (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer: To be as honest as I possibly can, The Devil's Plaything (or Veil of Blood or Vampire Ecstasy or The Curse of the Black Sisters or) is a complete bore. The movie has a good premise behind it the resurrection of a long dead vampire through the body of a descendant through the aid and assistance of a group of women dressed in black but the execution is horrible. There are great, long moments of screen time when literally nothing happens. Characters just stand around with nothing to do. There's no mystery, no suspense, and no plot points to care about. The acting is simply abysmal. Most of the acting involves a group of below average looking women dancing naked while staring at the camera. They do this repeatedly. And what little plot there is seems to be designed to get more of these less than attractive women naked so they can join in the dancing. While it's not as bad or pointless as the dancing or the plot in something like Orgy of the Dead, it comes close.
Problem: OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive negative
=++++=
Answer: This movie does have some great noirish/neorealist visuals, and it tells a story that is refreshingly free of Hollywood's sugar-coating, which was only possible because it was essentially an independent foreign film. But some of the scenes go on for much too long (the wedding, especially), and I found the exaggerated acting and unrealistic dialog to be more fit for the stage than for the silver screen.

The dialog was particularly distracting, and it seemed to get worse as the movie went on. Most of the characters were either Italian-Americans or Italian immigrants living in New York in the twenties and thirties, but their dialog sounded like they were practicing lines for a Shakespeare play while they mixed cement and laid bricks. Toward the end I was laughing, and not because the filmmakers wanted me to. I guess the stilted poetry could be defended by saying that the characters would have been speaking Italian, and the dialog is a literal translation of how they would really talk. But it absolutely did not work for me.

Another line of dialog made me laugh for a different reason: the main character's son, born and raised in New York in the 1920's, suddenly picks up a lovely lilting British accent. I'm only guessing this had something to do with the fact that the movie was made in England.

I give this movie an 'A' for effort and intention, but a considerably lower grade for execution.
An example of a movie review. positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A:
Just like wine, "Johnny Dangerously" gets better and better with every day. This clever, witty, well-acted film could very well stand on its own - but as a parody of the gangster genre, it's truly outstanding. In fact, it's quite obviously the best film of its kind... the funniest spoof of mob movies and even the respective period - although, admittedly, this position is probably easier to achieve when its main competitors are such primitive, vulgar and dull pseudocomedies as "Jane Austen's Mafia".