Features
The book uses a four star rating system. The lowest rating is "BOMB," followed by one and a half stars, rising in half-star increments to a maximum of four stars. The sole exception to this is Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult, which was rated with two and one third stars out of four. Made-for-television films are also included, however Maltin uses a different system for rating them - Below Average, Average and Above Average, with one review, for The Day After, rated with the variant "Way Above Average."
Another notable feature is that each review includes a reference to the source material for the film if it is based on previously published material. Films are listed alphabetically letter-by-letter, with articles ignored and transposed to the end of the title.
The Guide is notable for containing what the Guinness Book of World Records calls the world's shortest movie review. His 2 out of 4 star review of the 1948 musical Isn't It Romantic? consists of the word "No". Another very short review concerns the film Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed where he writes, "It is what it is."
Read more about this topic: Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“These, then, will be some of the features of democracy ... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, particolored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)