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Thank goodness he doesn't just include "classics," but also so many of those interesting B movies that sustained the studios and delighted pre- (and now post-) TV audiences. It's easy to have complaints about movie reviews, missing movies, and a few mistakes, but for something short, sweet, and relatively inclusive, Maltin's Classic Movie Guide stands up very well. Now that it's possible to see the films he reviews, it's easier to quibble, but his book helps in collecting and understanding the relative entertainment value of old movies.
This book was purchased for a film noir buff; he is very select in his views -- but rated this book tops.
Both are the very best of their kind. I had purchased the first edition of this book when it was called T.V.Movies. Buy now. You'll be a film buff in no time. Many years have come and gone;Now it's in two volumes. This is the book for movies from1960 and before.
It is s great supplement to his annual guide. This turned out to be great; extremely useful.
As comprehensive movies reference books go, Maltin's is the one to own. This is the type of guide you'll want to keep around forever, since there will never be that much updating to do (save adding more foreign/hitherto obscure films as they are released on DVD and reach a wider audience, so maybe update it every 5 years or longer). I should say, though, that Maltin is pretty good with the most important foreign films, especially French ones.4) Include the production studio for each film. I've been buying Leonard Maltin's annual movie guide since 1974 and I have never been swayed away from finding it to be the best guide out there of its type. This is maybe not as essential an idea as those above, but knowing the studio is helpful. True, the book would be thicker, but see my next comment.2) Offer a hardcover edition of the book. Various classic studios had their own styles and subjects (e.g., Warner brothers' gangster films, Universal's horror films, RKO's always reliable B-movies, the mostly horrible output of PRC and Monogram, great B studios like American International, Hammer, etc)., so it's often useful when coming across a film you've not known about before to know what studio produced it.All in all, though, this is truly the best guide to classic films out there.
I would like to make several suggestions for a revised version (I hope there is one), however:1) Bump up the cutoff year. But companies like Criterion are digging up hitherto lesser-known foreign classics, and all of those should be in here (also, there are quite a few British B films missing). I rarely run across an American film that isn't already included in the guide, but foreign films are a little less likely to appear here for the obvious reason that they are less known and widely seen in America. Maltin and his editors obviously had to pick a cutoff date, and they chose 1960, but that seems a little arbitrary. A more durable hardcover book can also accommodate more pages.3) Add more foreign films as they are released on DVD.
Maltin's capsule reviews are peerless, managing to really capture the essence of a film in only a few lines, and even when mostly panning a film, pointing out the good parts. My paperback is only a couple of years old, but I refer to it so often it's already falling apart. This would enable the inclusion of most of the classic black and white films of the 60s and incorporate those films that signaled the beginning of the modern era: Bonnie & Clyde (the modern crime film), Night of the Living Dead (the modern horror film), 2001 (the modern sci-fi film), etc. Since I gravitate more toward classic movies than current ones and watch TCM religiously, I was really happy when this guide came out. True, times really changed during that decade, but I would move the cutoff date up a little to when the MPAA was formed and the era of the modern film really began: 1968 (or if you want to round it up, 1970).
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