An example of a movie review. positive.

A: Answer: despite that fact that this film was written and directed by a woman, your ex is creepier, nastier, and more irrational than any zombie that ever lurched the earth.

The acting in this independent film actually is quite good, despite the less-than-wonderful script. It takes a pretty good actor to deliver an overwritten, cliched line and make it sound vaguely believable. Young Anthony de Marco, as Jake, puts in a particularly good performance.

Fortunately, the plot of this film is a lot better than the dialog. Try it, especially if you're not a monster fan. This is NOT a horror flick. Even though all the adult females are pretty monstrous, and although all the adult males act as if their brains were eaten in some earlier zombie film, "Jake's Closet" is suitable for mature adults.

The whole, this time, is much better than the sum of its parts.

An example of a movie review. negative.

A: I am definitely in the minority opinion on this one. "The Hurt Locker" has won more "Best Picture" awards from the critic groups than any other film this year. However, not only did I not like it, I found it hard to sit through.

There is minimal plot and little character development. They disarm bombs, fight, and disarm more bombs. That is the entire movie.

But the worst part was that the camera never stops moving and is constantly shaking. This has been a recent fad in film making and it is supposed to make it seem more real because it has a cheap, documentary look to it. The camera was shaking so much it was making me nauseous to look at the screen.

I normally don't care for war movies and "The Hurt Locker" was no exception. But you don't need to take my word for it because the critics love it.

An example of a movie review. negative.

A:
Clint Eastwood is Bronco Billy, the leader of a Wild West troupe, one of six regular misfits who comprise a struggling-to-break-even touring show. The seventh member of the bunch is a woman, Billy's assistant, but such women never last long, and the position is chronically open. Enter Antoinette Lilly (Sandra Locke Eastwood's girlfriend at the time). It seems Miss Lilly, as Doc (Scatman Crothers) calls her, is a would-be heiress who will only receive her long-deceased father's estate if she's married by the time she turns 30, so on the eve of that birthday she gets hitched to the cartoonish Geoffrey Lewis.

So, what's the plot of this film? It's hard to say. There's the romantic tension between Billy and Miss Lilly, but the problem is that for the first half of the movie she's so haughtily insipid and detestable that when she suddenly becomes 'one of the troupe' halfway through the film, it's not only unbelievable, but the audience is well past caring about her. There's the chronic lack of funds behind the Wild West show, but this topic isn't touched upon enough to really be the raison d'etre of the film. There's Miss Lilly's predicament of being stranded in the rural west, cut off from the funds that fuel her spoiled life of luxury (she's mistakenly believed to be dead by her family and the press). But are we really supposed to believe that she couldn't get back to New York and her waiting fortune if she gave it a bit of effort?

No, the point of this film seems to be that Billy is the leader of a family, a lovable bunch of losers who hang together through thick and thin. This is a warm, fuzzy film or at least tries to be.

Along the way, Clint shows us his skills with a gun, even foiling a bank robbery in a shooting that is grotesquely out of place in an otherwise relatively non-violent film. One of the gang is arrested on an old draft evasion charge; Billy bribes the local sheriff. The show's tent burns down; an orphanage makes them a new one. But numerous mundane pitfalls do not a plot make.

Compounding the problem is the acting, or lack thereof. Aside from Scatman Crothers, the supporting cast is quite amateurish. Eastwood isn't on top of his game either, though he looks better simply by virtue of being surrounded by such a lackluster bunch.

And for all this, the film plods on for 116 minutes. To what point? Good question

4 out of 10