An example of a movie review. negative.

A: The most ridiculous thing about this ridiculous movie is its conceit that if one becomes a saint, he or she and his or her family and his or her significant other live forever. Let's forget that in order to become a saint, the saint must be dead, and saints don't have significant others. That, for a millennium, Nick has been the Jolly Elf to Fred's Scrooge is never even hinted at! Open on Nick learning how to make toys, then on Fred learning how to run numbers; Nick giving a sick child a dolly, Fred repossessing the dolly, along with the family farm! After a few more such episodes, morph to present-day Fred venting his spleen at Siblings Anonymous as his fellow losers nod in empathy. There, I just wrote a more cohesive storyline than this idiocy!

This Santa, who is one "ho, ho, ho, ho, ho" away from a massive coronary, is a neurotic wuss saddled with the Queen of the Harpies, an operation straight out of Mega-Mall Hell, and answers to a Board (huh?) which just gave the Easter Bunny his pink egg. Oh, and his right-hand man is a ditzy blonde in a skin-tight mini-dress and go-go boots. Ho... ho... ho... ho... ho!

But what really sent me over the edge was Slam being named #1 on the Naughty List. Shouldn't a Naughty List be reserved for the future Hitlers and Stalins? Children who are the true embodiments of evil? Nope, to Old Sausage-Fingers, a good boy who lashes out because he is unwanted and unloved is the Demon Seed!

The nimrods behind Fred Claus should be boiled in their own pudding! Bah!

An example of a movie review. positive.

A: Fabulous film! Rented the DVD recently and was floored by this stunning piece of work. Douglas Sirk was a filmmaking genius and he gets performances out of Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone (Oscar winner), Robert Stack (Oscar nominated), and Lauren Bacall that words cannot describe. Paul Verhoeven brilliantly payed homage to this film by having Dorothy Malone play Sharon Stone's murdering inspirational guru in his Basic Instinct. What a great joke!

By turns the film is hilarious, riveting, campy, biting, trashy, compelling, and eye rolling! It's definately the grandaddy of every tawdry big-and-little screen soap opera but none have had the dazzling style like you'll see here: the camera work is smooth and polished, the use of color is breathtaking, the opening montage set to the title song is beyond memorable, the one dimensional characters are unforgettable, and the final image will have you scratching your head as to how the censors back then let it make the final cut!

While most older, highly regarded films can sometimes be a boring chore to sit through, Written on the Wind contains so much and goes by so fast that it's actually a shame when it ends. Thank you to Mr. Sirk for crafting -and Todd Haynes for drawing attention to- what has now become one of my favorite films of all time! SEE THIS MOVIE!!!

An example of a movie review. positive.

A:
The opening flourishes left me purring with delight at their inventiveness - the altered version of the Archers' logo, the introductory disclaimer, the way the camera pans over the cosmos. It's strange to think that 'It's a Wonderful Life' came out in the same year. No great coincidence: the 1940s was awash with heaven-and-earth films; but the glowing cotton wool nebulas and cutesy angels of the competition look tattered, something best passed over in silence, when placed next to Alfred Junge's vision.

It continues to look great all the way through, as more and more striking ideas are sprung upon us. I'm not a great fan of mixing colour with black and white in general. One of the two visual schemes almost always looks ugly when placed next to the other. Not so here. Powell dissolves colour into monochrome and monochrome into colour as if it's the most natural thing in the world, a mere change of palettes. Both the colour photography and the black and white could stand on their own.

As for the story ... this may be Pressburger's best script, or at least it would have been had the conclusion been a more logical outcome of preceding events. Other than that it's tight, yet with more going on than I can possibly allude to here. Was the heavenly stuff real or imaginary? (Or both? Perhaps Carter dreamt up a fantasy that was, as it so happened, true.) Everyone says we're meant to neither ask nor answer this question, but I don't see why. I'm sure we ARE meant to ask the question. The film even gives us clues as to what the answer is - indeed, the problem is that there are too many clues and they seem at first to be pointing in different directions. The fact that other things ought to occupy our attention as well doesn't mean that this shouldn't occupy us as well. There is, as I've said before, a lot going on.

Consider the scene in which Abraham Farlan (Heaven's prosecuting lawyer) plays a radio broadcast of a cricket match, and contemptuously says, 'The voice of England, 1945.' Dr. Reeves (the defence) acknowledges the exhibit with a great deal of embarrassment, and then produces one of his own: a blues song from America, which Farlan listens to as though he's got a lemon in his mouth. Reeves looks smug.

Snobbery? Well, I don't see why it's snobbish to condemn blues music - and that's not what Powell and Pressburger are doing, anyway. As the song is being played, we get a shot of the American soldiers listening to it: several of them nod their heads to the rhythm, perfectly at home. THEY don't find it incomprehensible. There's something valuable about the song and neither Reeves nor Farlan knows what it is. Reeves probably realises as much. All English audiences (and all Australian, Indian, etc. audiences as well) know without being told that there is something of value in the cricket broadcast, too; and that while Reeves understands THAT, he is unable to explain it to Farlan - hence the blues broadcast, which shows that people can understand each other without sharing an understanding of everything else. It's a clever scene.

One last thing. I found David Niven a bit cold, without the charisma he would acquire later in his career; but even so, I don't think a film has grabbed my heart quite so quickly after the action began, as this one did.