The Movie Guide

by James Monaco

From The Big Sleep to Babette's Feast, from Lawrence of Arabia to Drugstore Cowboy, The Movie Guide offers the inside word on 3,500 of the best motion pictures ever made. James Monaco is the president and founder of BASELINE, the world's leading supplier of information to the film and television industries. Among his previous books are The Encyclopedia of Film, American Film Now, and How to Read a Film.

1099 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 22, 1992

About the author

James Monaco is a writer and publisher based in Sag Harbor, NY. For more information please see JamesMonaco.com.

Reviews

[Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A prime example of bigger not equaling better. It's another dictionary of movie titles selected (and rated on the 5-asterisk scale) for their supposed importance -- and you scratch your head about what is excluded as much as for what is included. The texts for each entry were written by many authors and the quality is mostly subpar and the critical acumen often sophomoric. Selected by the "editors of BASELINE," whatever the fuck that is. OK, I looked it up; it's some movie database (pre-Internet) honchoed by Monaco. (Bet he's kicking his ass about not getting this db online before the Internet Movie Database plowed over all comers). I keep this around mainly because the pieces are mostly just run-on plot summaries, which does make it useful in one sense. It's so thick that the binding is not able to really hold the number of pages very well and the spine is bowed severely inward.