1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Updated with brand-new entries to describe the most recent major motion pictures, this critically-acclaimed volume spans more than a century of moviemaking, concisely describing 1001 of the best films from around the world. New in this edition are entries to describe such film hits as Lord of the Rings, Mystic River, Farenheit 9/11, and Million Dollar Baby. But in fact, this volume's team of critics goes back to 1902, describing such films as The Great Train Robbery, and progressing chronologically across the decades to cover the best cinematic dramas, comedies, westerns, musicals, suspense and horror films, gangster classics, films noir, sci-fi epics, documentaries, and adaptations of novels and stage plays made by filmmakers around the world. Each entry includes a full list of cast and credits, awards won by the film, an essay summarizing the story line and screen-history, and still shots of the film's memorable scenes. At the back of the book, both an alphabetical index and a genre index will help readers find any film they're looking for. Movie fans will find descriptions of great musicals like Singing in the Rain, westerns like High Noon, science-fiction classics like Star Wars, dramas like Chinatown and Schindler's List, and international classics from master directors who include Fellini, Antonioni, Resnais, Truffaut, Eisenstein, Kurosawa, and many others. Here is a volume that belongs in the personal library of film buffs, movie reviewers, collectors of DVDs-and every reader who enjoys reminiscing over great movies of the past and present. Hundreds of movie still shots in color and black and white. "... a great motivating guide to cinema. After reading one of its engaging, often profound entries on a missed film, you want to ... rent it. Best of all, it includes international, silent, animated, and recent films."
--Dallas Morning News

Customer Reviews: Read 42 more reviews...

2 out of 5 stars

Beware the spoilers! March 22, 2006
76 out of 84 found this review helpful

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die could be a great film guide. It is loaded with both well-known and obscure films, many of which I have sought out and enjoyed after reading about them in the book. I've really started to enjoy noir films because of this book's recommendations.

The fatal flaw in 1001 Movies is that they frequently give away the endings! For example, they often tell you when an important character dies at the end of the movie -- what is the point of that? Look for a different guide that doesn't spoil the endings.

2 out of 5 stars

Slanted to Horror and Recent Films; Not Woman-Friendly February 20, 2005
73 out of 135 found this review helpful

"1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" is slanted toward the tastes of teen male fans of the grotesque and the sensational who are unaware of, or don't care about, older and more woman-friendly films.

Just flipping through the book is an unpleasant experience if you aren't looking forward to seeing large images of a woman's eye being sliced open by a razor weilded by a male hand (p 74), a woman being hung by her neck, her mouth smeared with blood (p 639), a monster and a bloody body (p 653), a giant human cockroach eating another bloodied human body (p. 804), etc. etc. etc.

This emphasis on horror, the sensational, and the grotesque, and on the presence of females as the objects of horror, is demonstrated by the book's front cover -- Janet Leigh screaming in horror before her character was stabbed to death in "Psycho."

Molly Haskell, in "From Reverence to Rape," records how films, that used to feature an abundance of female characters in a variety of ranges, now focus on male ticket-buyers. This book focuses on males, as well.

Female stars are given very short shrift. Example: unless I missed it, there is not a single photograph of Greta Garbo in this large, heavy, 960 page book, with photographs on almost every page.

Greta Garbo? Greta Garbo? Not a big enough star?

Okay, it's understandable that a 14 year-old male fan who thinks of "Star Wars" as an example of the Dark Ages of filmmaking would have never heard of Greta Garbo, but when a book christens itself with the pretentious title, "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die," the reader is entitled to expect a bit more knowledge.

I guess Garbo's sin, in these editors' eyes, is that she was never stabbed to death in a film, or eaten by a giant, slimey monster. (One can almost hear the editors of this book thinking, "Man! Cool!")

Another star completely missing from this book -- Rudolph Valentino.

Umm ... do I need to explain this?

See, boys, half of the human race consists of women. Women like to watch movies, too. Once upon a time, Hollywood gave women beautiful men to ogle. Valentino was the first male megastar. His funeral was one of the most important events in the twentieth century history of the celebrity.

Guess you missed that ... while watching "Dawn of the Dead" one more time.

Readings of the relatively few women-friendly films that are mentioned are hopelessly off-key and uninformed.

"Broken Blossoms" is lauded for its use of oil-coated lenses.

Never, in the full page review, is it mentioned that "Broken Blossoms" is a full-length, mainstream Hollywood movie treatment of domestic violence, and that it contains a scene where the film's female protagonist, played by Lillian Gish, a huge star, is *beaten to death,* on camera, by her father.

It is remarkable that an early, silent film was so brave. No mainstream Hollywood film since has treated domestic violence against women with such power and frankness.

Even if you didn't care a whit about domestic violence, even if your only concern were for technique, you'd have to mention that Gish won praise for her ability to depict the girl's terror as her father breaks in on her hiding place.

The book never utters a word about the film's treatment of domestic violence, or even Gish's legendary handling of it.

The book has other flaws. Many of the more recent films listed are pleasant, but are not films that you should worry about dying before seeing. So, breathe easy about a lot of these pleasant but mediocre films.

In at least one case, a spoiler -- the ending of a movie whose ending you should not know before seeing the film -- is revealed. There may be spoilers in other comments, as well. I don't know, because, after a while, I stopped reading. This is not one of the 1001 books I must read before I die.

4 out of 5 stars

Spanning Cinema June 14, 2004
58 out of 67 found this review helpful

For the casual film fan this book provides an excellent overview of the cinema for the past century. In order to fit in the large number of mini reviews and commentaries for the selected entries the editors had to omit a good number of films that many would have deemed worthy of inclusion. The most egregious omissions were of silent films, of which only a relatively small number were included from the many years before the beginning of sound films. Film buffs may argue with some of the selections, but the inclusion of "small" and cult films alongside the well-known Academy Award winners is to be applauded. The editors, though, were often sloppy with the sidebar award section, giving a film credit for an Oscar win when only a nomination was received. There are several instances when at least two films from the same year were cited as winning the same Oscar. For those like myself who can recite year-by-year the Oscar award winners and nominees, the sidebar errors detracted from the scholarship of the work.

4 out of 5 stars

Caution February 23, 2005
40 out of 41 found this review helpful

Although this book provided an acceptably organized compilation of movie classics, I was bugged by the fact that reviews/thoughts included spoilers, or revelations of the movies' endings.

I purchased this book in order to discover movies I knew not of previously or had heard of and was interested in seeing. The occasional spoilers are given without warning and made me read with caution to those movies that I did not yet know the outcome of, which was quite tedious.

Overall, the reviews were convincing and thoughtful when not completely blatant, but do proceed with caution.

2 out of 5 stars

Must See? I Don't Think So. August 10, 2005
40 out of 147 found this review helpful

I usually like reading books like this, books full of all sorts of cool, but rather useless (unless you're planning on competing on Jeopardy! or a devoted cineast) information. Such books often send me searching for more information on new subjects. I thought this book would be lots of fun to read. It wasn't.

The first thing I want to know is, what planet do these movie critics hail from? They write these lavish articles, praising movies for things that most people go out of their way to avoid. It seems like half of these "must-see" films are either horror and/or horrifically violent, or else highly/purely sexual in theme. Some I had never heard of before, nor do I ever want to again: The 120 Days of Sodom (based on the writings of Marquis de Sade) and Videodrome are two of the worst. And if the films aren't sickening in subject, then often they are about the despair and futility of life. Ok, so life is hard and meaningless sometimes. I don't need a movie to tell me that.

Also, who chose the pictures to be included in here? There are pictures in here that are extremely disturbing, to put it mildly. I can't imagine what some of them would do to a young child who happened to pick it up and flip through it. I know they would have given me nightmares when I was younger. Some still managed to give me the heebie-jeebies.

There are a lot of good movies listed too. But plowing through the trash to find them got real tiresome real quick. Towards the end I was only skimming the entries, trying to avoid the more gruesome pictures (I didn't succeed) and only reading up on movies I had actually heard of.

If you are fanatical about cinema, and are more interested in nifty camera angles and lighting techniques than in being entertained, then 1001 Movies might have some interesting suggestions for you. For the everyday moviegoer, I would say that in the time it would take to read through this book, you could watch all three of the Lord of the Rings films end to end. And that would be time much better spent.

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