VideoHound's DVD Guide Book 3

Rating:
Summary: My most used movie guide.
Review: I have a shelf full of movie guides, but VideoHound's DVD Guide (Books 1-3) is the one I use most.

Not only does this guide review movies, but it includes separate ratings for the DVD, reviewing video and audio quality as well as extras. I find this information invaluable when trying to decide whether or not to add a DVD to my collection. (I do wish they'd more consistently compare the DVD with a previous Laserdisc release, but that's a quibble as not many people have a lot of money invested in Laserdiscs.)

VideoHound's movie reviews are helpful, concise and readable. The books also include countless reference lists and indexes that incorporate the previous editions as well as the latest one. Each edition covers only new material, and does not repeat previous reviews, so you need them all. Any book of this type is outdated by the time it gets to the stores, of course, because of the flood of new DVD's being released. A Book 4 is due.

As the name indicates, the VideoHound DVD Guide only covers movies released on DVD, so if you primarily want a book that tells you about some obscure movie on late night cable, you might prefer their Golden Movie Retriever or Leonard Maltin's, Martin & Porter's or Halliwell's guides.

Better yet, get more than one and compare viewpoints. No guide's reviews are "perfect," because nobody agrees with any one critic all the time. (Roger Ebert comes closest for me, but his books are altogether different, offering a depth of detailed analysis beyond what guides like VideoHound attempt.)

Anyone who really wants to know everything there is to know about a movie should check out IMDb (Internet Movie Database), where, among many other things, they link to several reviews of even obscure movies, with up to nearly 200 for popular ones. (For a quick overview of critical opinion, try rottentomatoes.com, which not only links to reviews, but reports an overall "score" ("Tomatometer") summarizing critics' ratings of each film.)

But for a useful end table "analog" reference, you won't go wrong with VideoHound, the DVD Guide if you buy DVDs or the Golden Movie Retriever if you don't.