A Book Review from The Movie Snob:

Reel Views, by James Berardinelli (2003). According to the foreword by Roger Ebert, Berardinelli is an electrical engineer by profession and a movie reviewer by avocation. He runs a website that he touts as "the largest non-commercial movie site on the net," and I recently added a connecting link to his page among the links on the left side of The Movie Court. In this book, Berardinelli collects around a thousand of his own reviews, almost all of them about movies released from 1990-2002. And he has deliberately selected only movies that he recommends; the grading system on display here includes only "recommended," "highly recommended," and "must see." That makes the book useful, although it deprives the reader of the pleasure of the occasional hatchet job.

I haven’t actually read the whole thing; I have read only the reviews of movies I have seen, to see whether Berardinelli is a good writer (he is) and whether he and I have similar taste in movies. Basically, I think we do, although he is a little too easy to entertain when it comes to romantic comedies. For example, I agree with his mild recommendation of Bounce, starring Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow, but then he goes and gives the same stamp of approval to the treacly Nicolas Cage vehicle City of Angels, the abysmal Affleck-Bullock pairing in Forces of Nature, and the utterly forgettable Return to Me. Still, I’d recommend this as a good book to have with you next time you go to Blockbuster without anything specific in mind.