Search This Blog

Thursday, February 15, 2007

How to find a good clean movie


Hollywood produces hundreds of movies every year and there are probably as many men and women who make a living reviewing them. These men and women often focus on the story being told rather than the movie's content when deciding if a film is good or bad. But there are a lot of movie viewers out there that take things like vulgar language, violence, and sex into consideration when they go to see a movie. I have unearthed three good movie review websites for these people who want to know about the content of a movie in addition to its artistic value.

The first is Yahoo! Movie Mom. The Movie Mom reviews movies with the intention of helping parents decide what movies are appropriate for their kids to watch, but I think many adults also will appreciate her reviews for their own personal viewing. Movie Mom uses a letter grade scale that considers several criteria: The age group the movie targets, use of profanity, nudity and sex, alcohol and drugs, violence and scariness, and diversity issues. What I like most about Movie Mom's reviews are the discussion points for after the movie that she includes with each review. Here are two of her reviews on recent DVD releases:

Flags of Our Fathers
Flicka

The second is The Dove Foundation movie reviews. The Dove Foundation is a non-profit Christian organization committed to encouraging Hollywood to make more family-friendly films. They merely judge a movie "family approved" or "not approved" but the method in which they decide whether a movie is family friendly or not can be helpful to anyone who wishes to avoid offensive material. A score between 0-5 is assigned to the movie in 6 different categories: Sex, Language, Drugs, Violence, Nudity, and Other (other is miscellaneous but possibly offensive material). Here is a sample of two of their reviews for recent theatre releases:

Music and Lyrics
The Last Sin Eater

The third is the self-proclaimed "biggest Christian movie database on the planet", Christiancinema.com. This website is best for people wanting to find faith-based movies or movies produced by Christian companies to rent or purchase. I used it recently to make a list of Christian and religious movies in the library's collection and I think others will find it useful. They have a movie review section, but many of the reviews link back to The Dove Foundation.

No comments: