Rating: 
Summary: Indispensable !
Review: This collection makes for hours of great reading. Despite some glaring ommissions, Orson Welles' "Magnificent Ambersons", to mention just one. This should be an essential addition to anyone's film library.
Rating: 
Summary: Great, qualitative criticism...but some serious omissions!
Review: This is a text that without question belongs in every film-lover's library. As with all good criticism, the opinions are expressed so skillfully and articulately that we can respect the writers' points of view, even when we may vehemently disagree with what is on the page. The book also contains numerous wonderful glossaries, including ones devoted to foreign films and year-by-year "ten best" lists -- beginning with 1931! My only criticism will be expected. Regardless of how hard a critic tries, not everyone in a film audience can be pleased. To include films such as "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (influential, certainly, but not a truly great film by any standards) and to omit the original "Jaws" ... I remain speechless. I also mourn the fact that "The Shawshank Redemption" (one of the most powerful and profound films I've ever seen) is nowhere to be found here. At any rate, it's still a must. If you love reading about film, grab it today and curl up for a few hours of interesting reading!
Rating: 
Summary: Why include unavailable movies?
Review: This is going to be the shortest review I've ever written. I checked out this book from the library and photocopied the "by genre" list in the back. I checked off the ones I had seen (suprisingly few considering how long I've been an avid film fan.) Anyway, as I was going through the list I found the 1950's version of "Death of a Salesman" listed. Now, everyone who has ever looked for that film will tell you it's not available on home video. So, why include it? Anyone who dared to try and tackle watching even a fraction of the movies listed here would have to use another guide such as Leonard Maltin's just to ascertain wheather or not the film is available. I am thinking of looking into "The best Films to Rent you've never heard of" Its actually an achievable goal and at the very least you know the films are available.
Rating:
Summary: Why include unavailable movies?
Review: This is going to be the shortest review I've ever written. I checked out this book from the library and photocopied the "by genre" list in the back. I checked off the ones I had seen (suprisingly few considering how long I've been an avid film fan.) Anyway, as I was going through the list I found the 1950's version of "Death of a Salesman" listed. Now, everyone who has ever looked for that film will tell you it's not available on home video. So, why include it? Anyone who dared to try and tackle watching even a fraction of the movies listed here would have to use another guide such as Leonard Maltin's just to ascertain wheather or not the film is available. I am thinking of looking into "The best Films to Rent you've never heard of" Its actually an achievable goal and at the very least you know the films are available.
Rating: 
Summary: Not the Best
Review: This is not a bad guide, but it is also not a "great" one. However significant the New York Times has been as a newspaper, and however influential its film reviews have been, it is true, nonetheless, that for most of their existence the NYT film reviews (IMHO) have not been of very high quality, and they don't make very enjoyable reading. (They have become much better over the past decade.) Much though it pains me to say this, the Oscar nominations each year have been a better indicator of important films than the New York Times list of the year's ten best films. (The National Board of Review nominations are an even better indicator. Nowadays there are Roger Ebert's picks.) If one wants a book that recommends 1000 or more films, one is better off getting a book that lists American film nominations and awards ("Movie Awards" (2001) by Tom O'Neil does this for me) than the NYT guide. There are, however, still better choices. For example, the films rated **** and *** (nearly 1000) in Halliwell's Film and Video Guide (yearly), which are listed both alphabetically and chronologically at the back of the book. These films are great with far greater frequency than those in the NYT guide. The NYT guide contains, in fact, 1002 reviews. Since 1931 the NYT has been publishing its yearly lists of the ten best films. Including the lists from 1991-94 (generated by the editors not the NYT) this amounts to 682 films (the lists weren't always exactly 10). Thus, it was necessary to add 320 films to make 1002. In fact, the editors added 475 films, deleting 155 original but supposedly unworthy recommendations in the process. They should have kept two dozen of these (for example, the Czech classic "Closely Watched Trains") and added fewer so-so films (for example, "Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song"). The overall selection of films is rather strange. According to most critics, Maltin, Halliwell, and Ebert, for example) the greatest number of great films were made in the 30's through 60's, and about 10% of the great films were silent. In the NYT guide, silent movies are dumped (even if the NYT included them in a top ten list), 50% of the films were released in 1970 or later, and 25% between 1985 and 1998, the last year included in the NYT guide. For an average of the Maltin (**** films), Halliwell (**** films) and Ebert (The Great Movies) distributions, which are in close agreement, the equivalent numbers are 28% and 9%. It would seem that the NYT guide is directed at movie goers for whom black and white films are unattractive and watching a silent film is like taking castor oil. Apart from the fact that the NYT guide recommends nearly 200 foreign films, I would almost say that its intended reader was the American teenager! It is the general, often expressed, feeling among critics that 1939 was the greatest year of all for producing excellent films. The NYT Guide recommends 17 films for that year, just slightly above the average of 14.6 films per year. But it also recommends more than 17 films for thirteen years between 1970 and 1998. For 1988 it recommends 27 films. I don't remember anyone ever having claimed that 1988 was the greatest year in American cinema. And the editors left out such notable 1988 films as "Cinema Paradiso," "Dangerous Liaisons," and "The Decalogue," I guess to make room for "The Naked Gun," "Biloxi Blues" and "Beetle Juice." It is interesting to note that Roger Vadim's 1961 "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" was included but not Stephen Frears' 1988 version in English. A film isn't always better just for being in French. The films in the NYT guide are very good for the most part. Two-thirds of them receive ratings of **** or ***1/2 from Maltin. 90% percent of them receive ratings of at least good. At this writing 529 of them are in my own film library, even if they're not all great films. (I'm not a snob.) If you watch all of the films in the NYT guide, you will, at the very least, see a lot of very good movies. But in no way (IMHO) are these films a good representation of the best 1000. The better "best film" books rate only about 100 films. Two that I really like are: Roger Ebert's "The Great Films" and Jay Carr's (ed.) "The A List," which is not as much fun to read as Ebert's book for the most part. If I were looking at this book for a gift, I would recommend other books instead. One which obviously comes to mind is Roger Ebert's book "The Great Films" (2002), which has just appeared in paperback. Another choice is David Parkinson's "The History of Film" (1996), or for a teenaged movie goer whose cinematic interests do not center on action films: Andrea Gronemeyer's "Film" (1998), an even briefer history. If you have deeper pockets, a book that I'm always hoping someone will buy for me is "Cinema Year by Year" (2003). This is a hefty coffee-table book, a little low-brow but lavishly illustrated, fun to read and perfect for reading in small doses; each year is only about 10 pages.
Rating:
Summary: ok
Review: this was a pretty goo book i was just did not understand why stand by me was to in it i mean that movie is a huge classic made in the 1980's.
Rating:
Summary: Not that useful or enjoyable a reference tool
Review: While its potentially very interesting to see what the Paper of Record thought about the great films of the last seventy-five years, it's in reality often not very useful, since Bosley Crowther, the main Times reviewer for decades, was the most middlebrow of reviewers. He seemed baffled or unaffected by most of the films later scholars and even the better contemporary critics (like Sarris or Kael) have found important. His successor, Vincent Canby, was better, but again had very predictable enthusiasms (including his notorious fondness for Woody Allen, whom he seemed to believe could do no wrong). Only Canby's successor Janet Maslin seems a reviewer whose writings are worth collecting, and her takes on films of the Eighties and Nineties are what makes this collection in the end worth owning.
Rating:
Summary: An Overreach
Review: Wow! -- Did Times critic Bosley Crowther blow his June, 1960 review of Psycho, as Janet Maslin candidly confesses in her brief Foreward. There are other missed opportunities among scattered triumphs spanning 70 years and 1,000 reviews from the stoutly conventional New York Times. And that's where the main interest in this otherwise compromised compilation lies. It's a catalog of quick reactions, before collective opinion has had a chance to harden and received wisdom to settle in. From the power of hindsight, It gives readers a chance to rate the professional taste-makers, those who make a living at arbitering what's good at the boxoffice and what isn't. Since the source is the Times, the entries not only reflect the cultural climate of the time, but engineer it as well. Thus, the critics' obtuse reaction to the seminal James Dean conveys something more profound than what might otherwise seem mere generational disconnect . If the overall impression is one of stilted stodginess, there are some notable exceptions: Vincent Canby's revealing approach to Stranger than Paradise, for one. And to be fair, it's difficult to overcome the limitations of a rigid format and a confined space to produce anything that really probes the movie in question. My real gripe lies with the inflated title, "Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made". Oh really! Who else but a dollar-chasing merchandiser would make such an extravagant claim. And how would a publication that systematically excluded from its pages the treasure trove of B-movies of the 30's, 40's, and 50's pretend to such status. It's like running a race and listing among the losers those who never ran.Thus such consensus classics as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kiss Me Deadly, I Walked with a Zombie, etc., are excluded from the outset, because of poor pedigree and catch-penny title. No list that replaces them with the likes of such certified clunkers as Anastasia or Suddenly Last Summer can or ought to be taken seriously. Of course, no daily newspaper can review every film that comes down the pipe. Choices have to be made. But it should be understood that an act of pre-emptory exclusion biases any list from the outset. More honest and less misleading, would have been a more modest title, like "Best 1,000 Movies The New York Times Saw Fit To Review". For movie lovers not laboring under this albatross of respectability, I suggest the works of Danny Peary as a more inclusive and reliable guide.
|
