All About Movies and Best Movie Review Websites

About Movies

Before delving into lists of the best movie websites, movie review sites, best movies, etc., I would like to celebrate the social significance, and the impressionistic power of this medium. If you are any kind of artist, be it an illustrator, animator, painter, sculptor, photographer, designer, interior decorator, writer, actor, or musician, your kind is used in the production of movies. Movies and TV (excluding reality TV and talking heads) are responsible for the most controversial, the most spiritual, the most historical, the most compassionate, the most inspirational and motivational, the most provocative, the most enlightening and endearing, the most powerful, and the most visually pleasing pieces of art that the world has ever known.

Movies and TV use all of the arts in unison and/or in contrasting juxtapositions to create works of art that do not exist anywhere else. Movies can displace us in time and space, compress both or expand both by integrating various arts with good screen writing. Movies can transport our minds and our emotions to a totally different place, a totally different time, and a totally different emotion than any we have experienced before. And movies do not require any great effort from the viewer to accomplish this, for once we are absorbed into the zeitgeist of arts that compose a movie, we understand it intuitively, emotionally, and intellectually simultaneously.

When well crafted, they absorb us so intimately and with such simplicity in doing so that we are literally hypnotized by their magic as we are thrown into another world alien yet recognizable and believable at the same time.

Sometimes movies just entertain us, and allow us to escape from our mundane existence at a price much cheaper than an airline ticket and a hotel. Sometimes movies overwhelm us with an experience that transforms our emotions and raises our consciousness. Sometimes movies provide us with a catharsis by making us laugh or cry or both. Sometimes movies literally show us the evil and the goodness that exist within us. And sometimes movies confront us by challenging our values and morals, and by exposing us, our society, and our culture. Sometimes movies transport us out of our bodies and into that of the character on the screen and do this so powerfully that we are momentarily changed as we empathize with the character.

There is no other medium that teaches us the social etiquette, manners, mannerisms, and behavior that ends up becoming a part of our culture or already is a part of our culture. Movies force us to look closely at ourselves and our values by making us experience things and emotions that we probably would not experience without them, and by providing us with vicarious experiences that we might never experience otherwise. Other than school, church, family, and relatives, no other medium provides us with a sense of right and wrong, morals and values like movies. It does this by showing us intellectually the contrast between goodness and the darkness and evil that exist here, there or everywhere, or by making us vicariously experience the goodness and/or darkness and evil that exist here, there, or everywhere, and it makes its point sometimes powerfully, sometimes subtlety, sometimes with humor and grace, often with a combination of all of these elements.

And in the process it changes us. Since it is a temporary vicarious experience it does not change us permanently, but over time, it does change society. Our social norms, mannerisms, and values are formed to a great extent by movies and TV. Movies and documentaries have the power to change us, to make us better people or to make us worse, depending on our current values and our frame of mind. For most of us, movies probably don’t change our fundamental values (although they can), but they powerfully reinforce our ethics and values when we ourselves have our doubts, brought about by a combination of our own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, our social status, and the chaotic random things that happen to all of us on a daily basis.

Movies give us the cultural tools we need to survive and socialize in the world we know and the world we don’t know. You may not walk out of a movie and directly use the words or phrases or behavior you witnessed, but in combination, over time, movies do make us all communicate more intuitively using more varieties of verbal and non verbal behavior than we would otherwise. This process of socializing us to culture makes us more empathetic and more intuitive and ensures that we communicate instead of dominate.

The Myth That Books Are Always Better Than the Movie

Make no mistake about it. Usually, the book is better than the movie. But only if you can imagine the book, kind of like making your own personal movie.

Most books are not read at one session. In our busy lives, a lot can happen between readings, and this makes it difficult to pick a book back up and pick up exactly where we left off. You can see a lot more movies than you can read books solely because it takes more time to read a book than see a movie. Nevertheless, if you have the time and the imagination, (not all of us have even one of these let alone the other one), books are usually better (mainly because you control the imagination). However, there are plenty of examples of movies that were better than the book.

Some books are just horribly written. Full of exposition and description but lacking character, or the opposite, full of plot and dialogue but devoid of any emotion or meaning. But often a good screen writer and director can understand the intent and can visualize and make visual in mere moments what it took the writer hundreds or thousand of words to do. It is not because we lack imagination that we go to the movies instead of reading. It is because we can not envision something we have never experienced and we can not experience something we can not envision. Movies merge the experience and the vision by uniting our emotions with our senses and our intellect.

A good example of a badly written book that was transformed into a great set of movies is the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The author, J.R. Tolkien, tried to make a reference book on the geography and history of Middle Earth into three novels, where the plot and characters are subservient to the descriptions of Middle Earth and its history. The movies were able to juxtapose these elements in real time with the narrative appearing simultaneously on the screen with the visual geography and history.

A second example is Twilight. I know I am going to be on a lot of peoples hit list for these remarks, but here goes. The book has dialogue that is juvenile and pretentious and just goes on and on about one trivial behavioral detail after another with regard to the looks and actions of its two main characters. As is true of many books, the middle part of it is not part of the storyline, and contains details that do not tell us what is important about the characters motivations or feelings. Most of the characters other than Bella and Edward are mere props in the book, stilted. There is no third character to make transitions or give us the tension that exists in a trilogy. The movie cuts out all of this redundant dialogue not only because it has to in order to make the movie 2 hours long instead of 20, but because it simply is not necessary. We are more interested in why Bella wants to become a vampire and throw her life away to a man/vampire she is in love with than we are with the details of what she is thinking from moment to moment on and on for what seems like decades. Through the non-verbal power of music and imagery, the movie intuitively tells us why and expresses the emotions in a minute that the book takes forever to do so.

These two examples were picked because they are kind of polar opposites. Tolkien – too much description and exposition and history with a lack of character development. Twilight with too much emphasis on the characters details but not enough context to see why the characters behave the way they do. The shallowness of the dialogue is another matter.

Below you will find some WEB articles comparing film to books.


Comparison of Lord of the Rings Books to the Movies
28 Reasons Why Twilight the movie Is Better Than Twilight the book DON’T MISS THE LAST FEW IN THIS SLIDESHOW. HILARIOUS.
Books Versus Movies – Time Magazine Movie Critic
Essays: Reading a Book Versus Watching a Movie
Upton Sinclairs Oil Versus Movie There Will Be Blood VERY ACADEMIC.
Revelations: Books Vs. Movies by Clive Barker VERY TRUTHFUL
Great Geek Debates: Books Vs. Movies Wired Magazine TRUE TO ITS TITLE
463 Movies Better Than the Book – From Book Readers

The Greatest 9,331 Movies Of All Time As Compiled By Brad Bourland

The movie websites below contain various lists of the best movies out today, on DVD, and best movies of all time, along with reviews and details on each of these movies. At the end of this article there is a list of lists, a list of 3,600 lists of movies. But perhaps the lengthiest and most sincere quest to catalog the best movies of all time has to go to Brad Bourland, a simple grocery clerk from Austin, Texas, who has spent many years of his life reviewing all of the movie review websites in an attempt to conduct a meta review, a review of all of the reviewers, of the top 9,331 movies of all time.

Brad’s project began back in 2001, when he started with the reasonable goal of rating 200-300 films. Nine years later, after spending more than 1,600 hours in seven libraries in three states, logging more than 4,000 hours on dozens of computers, and rummaging through 110 books, his project was ready for the masses.

This link is to an article in Salon on this mans single minded quest. Brads website, which contains the full list in MS Word format, is contained as a link within the Salon article.

Best Movie Websites


IMDB.com

IMBD is the standard against which all other movie/tv websites are compared. It has more movies listed and has a professional version which can be used if you are in the industry and searching for talent, looking for films in production, shopping your resume, etc. It has a large number of ways to search for films and a huge database. And you can create you own personal list of films with links to the movies in the IMDB database. It ranks all movies by critics and users, so you can get a list of the best 250 movies as reviewed by users of IMDB, or the worst 100 movies of all time as determined by users... You can look up virtually anything about a movie: cast, director, editing, art direction, awards, costumes, photography, plot, and much much more. You can also view many movies and tv shows online.

While IMDB has more films and more info. on each film, including more reviews, than any other website, it can be overwhelming at times, and it does not have a real clean interface. For example, the listing of movies to watch online is not organized and finding movie reviews involves more than a couple mouse clicks. But if you want to know exactly how each audience voted for a film, from age group to gender, etc., this site has a vast amount of info. It can take some getting used to. However, once you learn it, this site will be your favorite.

VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever

For many years VideoHound published a giant quality paperback book in 8 by 10 inch newspaper thin pages titled the Golden Movie Retriever. The book is over 2,000 pages long and all good independent video rental stores had a copy. That book had a gazillion movie reviews, along with several hundred lists of movies in categories you could not find anyplace else, like slasher films, hipster films, cult classic, etc. Now finally, it also has a website. The website has films listed in 26 different genres, including ones you won’t find elsewhere, like Film Noir, Art and Cult Films, Religion and Spirituality, Social Issues, and True Stories. It also has the lists. 24 pages of list names, for a total of several hundred different lists, such as for example a list of 3-D Flicks, a list of movies about Alien Babes, a list of movies about amnesia, a list of movies about Meteors and Asteroids, etc.

Videohound is also the one of a few sites to realize that Film Awards deserves it’s own menu tab. There simply are so many different organizations awarding films in so many different categories for so many decades that Awards deserves its own menu tab.

In addition to all the genres and categories which you can use to find films, this site also lets you browse films functionally by Actors, Directors, Cinematographers, Composers, and Writers.

VideoHound also has a tab for blogs such as reviews of current films and a store where you can purchase books or DVDs. The one thing you can’t do is directly go to Amazon as Videohound has its own growing store of books and DVDs, usually at significantly less than retail prices, but also usually not as low as used items on Amazon.

Finally, this site allows you to create your own profile. There is a menu tab for creating and accessing your profile. From here you can create your own list of movies you have seen or want to see and rate them and review them. This is a very easy to use system. You can add movies to your personal list and rate them from within almost any menu. For example, using a search for a movie. For example, by finding the movie by browsing movies in a genre. You can share the entire list or a customized subset from your list with others via an email system. You can also share by sending to facebook, etc, as well as follow on Facebook, Twitter, etc.. And you can immediately share your thoughts via Twitter, Delicious, Digg, etc. The only downside is that you can not see or edit your lists in a spreadsheet like format and you can not download your lists to Excel. See They Shoot Pictures Don’t They link below for an Excel spreadsheet of 8,800 best films that you can edit in Excel.

About the only criticism of this site besides the inability to get your custom lists you made and your favorite movies as a spreadsheet file is that this site is a little slow from time to time.

Films101.com

The great thing about this site is that you can get lists of the top 200 or so films in each genre with links to the info. on each film in imdb.com, and mrqe.com. More on the latter in a moment. This site is linked to several other sites including amazon.com so you can buy a new or used DVD. However, I could not find a link to netflix.com on this site.

AllMovie.com

This site lists thousands of movies by type/category. The menu allows you to list all films in each category or search for a specific film. There are 12 categories. The top few to several hundred films (depending on category) are listed for each category, sorted by the films overall rating on a 5 star system. The short description in the listing has title, year, and director, with links to a full description of the film that includes awards, cast, etc. The full description of the film includes a list of similar works and related works, which is very helpful if you like the film and want to find other related or similar works. What makes this site unique is that there is a link to info. on the DVD of the movie. And this link has a huge amount of info. on the DVD such as a listing of all extra features on the DVD, the number of DVDs in the set, the total length, menu options, aspect ratio, etc. This site has two companion sites called AllMusic and Allgame which you can get to from the AllMovie website. The AllMusic site is very good.

MRQE.com

This stands for Movie Review Query Engine. When you search for a film in this database or find it on a list, you then get a web linked list of all of the reviews that were ever done on the movie, with web links to each review. You also get a meta-review, a statistical analysis of what all of the critics together thought of the movie on a scale of 1 to 5 as a bar chart. You can even rank the list of reviews from good to bad, so the best reviews are at the top and the worst at the bottom. All movies on this database/website are also linked to Netflix, Amazon, Blockbuster, etc. so you can automatically go to the movie on that particular site that you choose and either order it, rent it, or watch it immediately, or put in you queue of movies to be watched.

Metacritic.com

Similar to MRQE, but instead of looking at what lots of different critics each thought of a movie or music, this site compiles scores from all the critics and gives a composite result. While MRQE does a little of this, this site does it better and rates new movies, movies on DVD, new TV, older TV, and music. It does this by genre and alphabetically. It provides lists of the composite scores in a number of different categories. And it even lets you see how each critic compares to other critics on average. For example: Roger Ebert ranks all movies an average of 9 points higher than the average, or Village Voice ranks all movies an average of 5 points lower.

Theyshootpictures.com

This is an extremely extensive list of films. The top 400 films have built in mini-descriptions so you don’t have to flip to another website. The top 1000 reviews can be sorted. And if you want to edit the list for your own personal list, you can download the top 8,800 films of all time as an Excel file and then play around with this all you want. (You must have Excel or this link will not work.) The excel file has two hyperlink fields. One field for Amazon and the other for IMDB.com. So you can do an incredible amount offline with this excel file. The excel table has an extensive list of fields/columns, and you can obviously add columns to it once you download it. This site also has a very long list of weblinks to hundreds of other film websites. This is a well organized site that allows you to look at lists of movies and their weblinks in many many different ways.

EmpireOnline.com

If you are only interested in new movies, upcoming movies, and what’s out and coming out on DVD, this is the best site there is. Extensive coverage of new films with a month by month release date catalog that looks forward over a year and a half. This is the same company that makes the British magazine Empire, the slickest and best movie magazine on the market.

Rogerebert.com

While Empire may be the slickest and largest site for examining new movies, Roger Ebert’s site is the best way to very quickly review all of the current releases at theatres now. His one minute review section has very concise reviews of most if not all of the currently released movies in theatres now. If you are planning on seeing a movie tonight and have lots of choices but little time to make a decision, you can get the quickest and probably the best and most reliable reviews from this site. Of course, Roger also has his reviews of older movies here as well, and the latest news from Hollywood.

“Best of Lists” List of Movie Lists

About 3,600 different lists of movies, such as cult films, chick flicks, Bond movies, top spiritual films, MTV Movie Awards, AFI’s 100 Years 100 Movies, Independent Spirit Awards, etc. If you don’t know exactly what you want to watch but have and idea, use one of these lists to help you.


Best movies so far in 2010
(If not available on DVD or Netflix now, will be by end of year)

Toy Story 3
Inception
Shutter Island
Joan Rivers – A Piece of Work
The Runaways
Alice in Wonderland
The Wolfman
The Book of Eli
Splice
Scott Pilgrim Versus The World
The Lovely Bones
Diary of A Wimpy Kid
Get Him To The Greek
Creation
The Town
The Kids Are All Right
The Eclipse
Brooklyn’s Finest
A Million In The Morning



Best TV Shows so Far in 2010

Mad Men
Fringe
Boston MED
Boardwalk Empire
House, M.D.
The Big Bang Theory (a sitcom)
Chelsea Handler Late Night
Haven – New
The United States of Tara
The Office
Glee
Weeds
The Secret Life of the American Teenager
Dexter
30 Rock

Best TV Shows Of All Time

The Simpsons
30 Days
Weeds
The Closer
Intervention
Secret Life of An American Teenager
Star Trek – The Next Generation
120 Minutes
MTV Unplugged
Project Runway
Friends
Seinfeld
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Cosby Show
Mork and Mindy
30 Rock
House
Greys Anatomy
Heroes
The Gilmore Girls
True Blood
The X Files
ER
The Sopranos
WKRP in Cincinnatti
The Wire
Twin Peaks
Six Feet Under
Hill Street Blues
Saturday Night Live
Cheers
All in The Family
The Daily Show
Freaks and Geeks
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
Taxi
Get Smart
The Jeffersons
Ren and Stimpy
Farscape
Battlestar Galactica
South Park
Mad Men
M.A.S.H.
The Andy Griffith Show
The Dick Van Dyke Show

Best News, Political, and Talk Shows of All Time

Nightline
60 Minutes
PBS Frontline
The Rachel Maddow Show
The Daily Show
Oprah Winfrey
Tyra AKA The Tyra Show


Good to Great Movies and Documentaries and TV Out on DVD or Netflix Now

Madmen – Season 3
The Blues – A Documentary on Seven DVDs
30 Days – Season 1 (Morgon Spurlock who did Super Size Me created this)
Blue State
Speak
Precious: Based on the novel by Sapphire
The Cove – Best documentary of 2009
Food Inc. Best documentary of 2009
Crazy Heart
Diary of A Wimpy Kid
Bad Lieutenant
Inglorius Basterds
A Serious Man
Up In The Air
Up
Drag Me To Hell
Public Enemies
Avatar
The Hangover
Nine
Where The Wild Things Are
It’s Complicated
Sherlock Holmes
The Informant
Whip It
Moon
The Blind Side
Invictus
500 Days of Summer
Coraline
Star Trek
The Heart is A Drum Machine
The Beautiful Truth
King Corn
A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash
In the Realms of the Unreal
Hounddog
No Impact Man
Inked: The Best of Season One
The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
Girls Rock
The Botany of Desire
The Future We Will Create
Mad Hot Ballroom
Rivers and Tides
12
Fuel
Quills
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

Best Documentaries of All Time

Before perusing my list of best documentaries of all time, please take a look at the following website called Box Office Mojo. It includes a list of all documentaries that were introduced into theatres from 1982 to present, including their ranking in box office receipts, their life gross ticket revenues, number of theatres they were shown in, the date they were released to theatres, and weblinks to each of the documentaries with additional information

BTW Boxofficemojo is a great site if you are looking for statistical info on box office results. It has some amazing info. For example, did you know that ET the Extraterrestial was number one at the box office more weeks in a row than any other film, including Titanic?

BoxOfficeMojo.com.

Harlan County. U.S.A.
Hoop Dreams
The Thin Blue Line
The 11th Hour
A Crude Awakening
Who Killed The Electric Car
Home
Blue Water
Planet Earth
Life
Bowling For Columbine
The Fog of War
Supersize Me
Born Into Brothels
Food, Inc.
The Cove
Fahrenheit 911
Winged Migration
March of the Penguins
Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room
A Brief History of Time
The U.S. Versus John Lennon
More Than A Game
The Most Dangerous Man in America….
This Film Is Not Yet Rated
Bushs Brain
Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train
Jimmy Carter, Main From Plains
King Corn
Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?
Woodstock
Sicko
Hearts and Minds
Triumph Of The Will
No End In Sight
The Ascent of Man
The Corporation
Night and Fog
The Times of Harvey Milk
Berkley in the 1960s
The War Room
Dark Days
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
The War At Home
Streetwize
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdochs War on Journalism
The Slow Poisoning of India
A War On Science
Darwins Nightmare
Cosmos
Jonestown
Aileen Wournos: The Selling of A Serial Killer
Jesus Heart
Young@Heart

Movies To Come To Theatres Soon – Remainder of 2010
** Means will probably also be a hit at the box office

** The Town
Legend of The Guardians (3D)
The Virginity Hit
A Mothers Courage: Talking Back to Autism
Buried
Collapse
Ghetto Physics: Will The Real Pimps and Hos Please Stand Up
Megamind
Sin City 2
When Worlds Collide
The Other Side
The Next 3 Days
True Grit – Remake by the Coen Brothers
Conviction
The Tourist – teams up Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp
Hereafter – Directed by Clint Eastwood
** The Social Network – About the beginnings of Facebook
How Do You Know
I’m Still Here – documentary on Joaquin Phoenix
Never Let Me Go
Catfish
** Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps – Oliver Stone has been slipping lately but this might be his comeback
The Tempest – Julie Taymors remake of Shakespeare from a feminist viewpoint. She did Across the Universe and Frida
** Little Fockers - just for the fun of it. Probably wont be as good as first two.
Black Swan – Natalie Portman. Directed by Aron Darunovsky - I know I spelled his name wrong.
** Freakonomics – series of 5 short documentaries taken from the book – each by different director
Nowhere Boy – early years of John Lennon
Fair Game
The Next Three Days
** Burlesque – Christina Aguilera and Kristen Bell
Love and Other Drugs
Somewhere
Blue Valentine
The Tree of Life
Due Date

Movies That May Be Good but Will be Very Violent and Possibly Gruesome

127 Hours
Buried
Devil – by M. Night Shyalaman. This film is not terribly violent. But its emphasis on religious beliefs and meanings may be a little controversial. Can M. Night return to the success he had with The Sixth Sense and Signs?

Best Film Directors of All Time

Woody Allen
Robert Altman
Paul Thomas Anderson
Judd Apatow
Darren Aronofsky
Caroll Ballard
Warren Beatty
Ingmar Bergman
Bernardo Bertolucci
Kathryn Bigelow
Albert Brooks
James Cameron
John Cassavettes
Ethan and Joel Coen
Francis Ford Coppola
David Cronenberg
Brian De Palma
Guillermo del Toro
Jonathan Demme
Clint Eastwood
David Fincher
Milos Forman
William Friedkin
Terry Gilliam
Alfred Hitchcock
Peter Jackson
Lawrence Kasdan
Elia Kazan
Stanley Kubrick
David Lean
Spike Lee
Sidney Lumet
David Lynch
Terrence Malick
David Mamet
Michael Mann
Sam Mendes
Mike Nichols
Alan Parker
Arthur Penn
Sean Penn
Roman Polanski
Sydney Pollack
Otto Preminger
Sam Raimi
Ken Russell
John Sayles
Martin Scorsese
Ridley Scott
Steven Soderbergh
Steven Spielberg
Oliver Stone
Quentin Tarantino
Francois Truffaut
John Waters
Orson Welles
Frederick Wiseman