Question: question: Made by a metalhead, this documentary of the musical genre both informs and entertains with its range of interviewees.

numbered reviews: 1. At once playful and thorough, the documentary is also stacked teased-hair high with wicked performance footage.
2. Unlikely to win many new converts, but its core audience should have a rockin' good time.
3. Interviews with metal practitioners such as Tony Iommi, Alice Cooper, Rob Zombie and Dee Snider, journalists and academic types paint a compelling portrait of a vibrant society of outsiders.
4. The film is packed with hilarious, often poignant interviews with metal luminaries.
5. Acts not as the window for the outsider into the spectacle of heavy metal music, as the filmmakers proclaim it to be, but an unprovoked fan's defense for liking what he likes
6. Full of splendid social and psychological insights.
7. You might not go out and buy the latest Slipknot album after seeing it, but you will understand why some disenfranchised kid would.
8. A lightweight fanboy valentine for ostensibly heavyweight music.
9. There's so much information and so many finely honed arguments in this ultimately joyous film that it's liable to send audiences scurrying home to their computers to download the bands they've just heard.
10. Those who only remember metal as an MTV aberration from the 1980s will learn a lot from Dunn's film, and metal heads will find vindication for their dedication to a music that has been condemned and dismissed as infantile and depraved.


question: A mindless adventure flick with a preposterous plot.

numbered reviews: 1. From the opening civil war naval battle to the closing credits, I was glued to this film with non-stop action. Don't miss it!
2. It's a pleasure to see a potential franchise develop from such an unlikely source.
3. The mindless Sahara is smart enough to keep the action and wisecracks at a fevered clip.
4. Arid as the sand-covered dunes, "Sahara" is a made-for-TV flick disguised as the return of Indiana Jones.
5. While I'd be happy to see another cinematic adventure for Dirk Pitt, I don't ever want to see another Breck Eisner film in my life.
6. Like a lightweight novel suitable for beach reading, Sahara is mildly entertaining, but I can't recommend it.
7. [A]s delightful a bit of... hokum as we've seen in some time. You don't take it seriously for a minute... [Y]ou get a big bag of popcorn, sit back, and enjoy.
8. Has enough humor and adventure that I'm almost willing to overlook the preposterous plot
9. Someone had the brilliant idea to treat Sahara as a Hope and Crosby "Road" picture pasted onto a James Bond/Indiana Jones plot.
10. Mindless, but fun and entertaining. It's sort of James Bondish without the ridiculous special effects. I enjoyed it, mainly because of McConaughey and Zahn.


question: This update of Capra doesn't hold a candle to the original, and even on its own merits, Mr. Deeds is still indifferently acted and stale.

numbered reviews: 1. Slackly directed, but there isn't a mean bone in its body (even the bad people aren't all that bad), and its good nature rubs off on you.
2. In "Mr. Deeds," there is no ambition, no pretense whatsoever; it is inexplicably proud of its forgettable nature."
3. Surprisingly sweet and, dare we say it, old-fashioned.
4. It ranks among [Sandler's] better work. Frank Capra would not approve, but he's not rolling in his grave, either.
5. It's not that the gags aren't funny here and there ... it's that they don't add up to a movie, or really pretend to.
6. Makes the Capra film, labeled cornball by some even in 1936, seem like Shakespeare.
7. While Brill's direction is crisp, Herlihy's jokes aren't much.
8. A half-good update of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.
9. What's next? Rob Schneider, Dana Carvey and Sarah Michelle Gellar in The Philadelphia Story? David Spade as Citizen Kane?
10. Comically flat and flawed on many levels.


question: Horror icon Wes Craven's subversive deconstruction of the genre is sly, witty, and surprisingly effective as a slasher film itself, even if it's a little too cheeky for some.

numbered reviews:
Answer: 1. Maybe not the first metamovie, but certainly the one that popularized the genre.
2. ...a fun, well-paced slasher...
3. a nineties-style teenage slasher movie with just enough tongue-in-cheek understanding of its own silliness to make it gruesomely fun without being insulting
4. The picture is so full of cross-references, self-mockery and movies within movies (including a stalking that's recorded on video) that it can't help turning into a precious two-hour in-joke.
5. The movie's only wrinkle is that it is, in a crude fashion, post-modernist. Pardon me while I alert the media.
6. By the time Scream arrives at its final twist, Craven has done too many contortions of his own to give the finale much shock value.
7. The movie contains the usual stock horror characters, but they are supplied with dialogue, often surprisingly smart and funny, that serves as a running, biting commentary on slasher conventions.
8. Remains a highly polished piece of meta-slasher mayhem.
9. Scream may be a cut above the gore fests that line the dimly lit back wall at your video store, but it is a far cry from genre classics like Halloween or Craven's own Nightmare On Elm Street.
10. It is a fright film that takes elements from classics that evoked the screamin' meemies and reinvents melodramatic applications offering a new spin to slice-and-dice antics. Gallows humor runs rampant, too.