Don’t ask me how I found it, but it is more than useful given Netflix’s lying rating system: The Movie Review Query Engine. Why base your movie choices on a single review, when you can see the reviews from multiple sources at once? This week all the movies below are linked to MRQE instead of the normal IMDB links.

The Recruit (thriller): It has all the right ingredients to be a good spy movie: The CIA, the techie geek genius, the skinny, fat-lipped love interest, some kung-fu, and some gun fighting. But just because you have flour, sugar, milk, and some eggs, does not mean you’ll have a cake by the end. Sometimes you end up with crappy tasting play-doh. I think this made the Bourne Identity seem like a masterpiece. C

American Splendor (comedy/biography): The story of Harvey Pekar, a comic writer. If you are into character movies, this one is great. The story isn’t really that great, but it was really nicely done, and the characters were phenomenal. After I sealed it in the return envelope, I wanted to watch it again. A

Lift (drama): This was a movie about a woman who was a thief, and it was supposed to be about some sort of caper gone wrong. Instead, it ended up being a story about a girl and her mother. Most of the time I felt like I was watching an after school special on the pitfalls of stealing. Hey, Netflix! Your plot summaries suck major ass. Don’t trick me into renting this crap. D

*MRQE Edition

Posted in Movies