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:
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“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)
“Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)