Hoping to do something relevant and helpful here, I thought I would offer a few of the sources I use for movie reviews and information, and ask you all to fill us in on where you go for yours. Some of mine are local sources, some are larger. Some are Mormon, some are not. I’m just going to list them, with the caveat that I get reviews from ALL OVER THE PLACE, and not just these sources. The list is not comprehensive in any sense of the term. These are just some of the places that I regularly look to when I want to know about a movie and no one has offered anything else. I’m not going to list this site because, well, isn’t it everybody’s first choice?
A Motley Vision - Sister love!
Toward an LDS Cinema - Not currently adding content, but lots of good reviews from before.
Yahoo! Movies - Links to reviews of all kinds from here.
IMDb – Who can do without it?
Hatrack River - Orson Scott Card’s reviews of everything, including movies.
Rotten Tomatoes - Pretty well knows source for multiple reviews from fans and famous critics.
Kids in Mind - Detailed, family oriented alternate movie ratings. Now with an iPhone app.
Box Office Mojo - Best stats site I know of.
Local Papers – Good stuff on all these sites
That’s a start of my list. Maybe by working together we can come up with some resources that we don’t all know about, and that can help us in our media decision making. So, where do you get your movie info?
4 comments
KevinB says:
August 29, 2010 at 1:40 pm (UTC 0)
The best site for me is Decent Films run by Catholic Steven Graydanus — by far the best writing and analysis of film from a decent (moral), religious perspective. (Differences between Catholic and Mormon perspectives on morality in film are almost non-existent)
Kids in Mind seems to be the best advanced content analysis site for movie PSV content. Others are Screen it!, Common Sense Media, and Parent Previews.
IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, as mentioned above, are invaluable. For ‘secular’ movie reviews, I read Roger Ebert, James Berardinelli, MaryAnn Johanson, and LDS-alum Eric D. Snider.
For LDS film information, resources are pretty limited — the local Utah papers linked by Adam above will probably be the best options for reviews of LDS films when they are released. The other (admittedly minimal) links are in the Blogroll in the right sidebar.
Netflix does a pretty good job of keeping LDS films in stock, so that seems to be the best resource for actually finding LDS films to rent. (Utah Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos have a handful of LDS films, although they’re almost all going out of business now…)
Unfortunately for LDS filmmakers there aren’t a lot of options (other than paying $20 to buy the DVD through Deseret Book) for interested people to see their movie, unless Netflix happens to carry it. We really need a better distribution model, whether Internet streaming or something, because there are a lot of movies on my list to see that I can’t find anywhere (and spending $20 to buy a DVD one hasn’t seen isn’t realistic, even if you want to support the LDS film industry — there needs to be a better way to rent and view LDS films. That’s a subject for another post, however…)
KevinB says:
August 29, 2010 at 1:44 pm (UTC 0)
Since this post invites comments with a lot of links in them, let me remind everyone that comments with links have the potential to trigger the spam filter. If your comment doesn’t appear, email ldscinema -at- motleyvision.org (or use the email function on the “About” page) and we’ll try to keep on top of things and release your comment from the trash bin in a timely fashion…
Anneke says:
August 30, 2010 at 6:45 am (UTC 0)
I’m a big fan of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Movie Reviews site – extremely thorough, and very clear.
Wm Morris says:
September 9, 2010 at 11:42 pm (UTC 0)
Kevin beat me too the punch. I like to use Eric D. Snider as an initial filter and then go from there to some of the content review sites as well as whatever reviews look interesting to me on Rotten Tomatoes.