Ten Thorough Years

Scott Hardie | April 7, 2009
It's been a long time since the name "Thorough Movie Reviews" made sense. In 1999, it started as a joke, with repetitive three-word reviews describing every movie I saw. In 2001 I expanded it to roughly 5 sentences per review, still short. In 2004, I blew it up to long-form reviews of any length I liked. In 2006, I invited other site users to contribute reviews, and theirs often turned out longer than mine.

Personal and professional obligations have made it hard for me to find time for properly reviewing movies (not to mention seeing many movies in the first place), but I still want to keep up the feature, because I still enjoy it. The solution struck me recently: In this era of Twitter and Facebook, micro content is king, and ultra-short reviews would bring the feature back to its origins anyway. That's the premise behind the new incarnation of Thorough Movie Reviews beginning today: Short reviews of no more than 255 characters, enough for about two sentences. It's perfect: It affords brevity when you don't have a lot to say, and forces creative focus when you do have a lot to say. (For those of you who still enjoy writing long reviews, Kelly talked me into keeping a long-form option in the form.)

And it just so happens that today is the tenth anniversary of the feature. To celebrate, I've introduced a whopping 68 new reviews to the site, some movies that I saw years ago and some that I just watched last night, all of them never reviewed before by me and all of them in the new ultra-short format. I've also done something that should make browsing more fun, something that's been missing from the site for much too long: Options to filter reviews just by what's in theaters and what's new on DVD, as well as a separate page for older films. (If you want to read my 68 reviews quickly without clicking on each link in Dashboard, these three links are the fastest way.)

I encourage all site users to try out the new reviewing format. These short reviews are like potato chips, you find yourself writing one after another after another. Thorough Movie Reviews are now more fun to write and more fun to read, and that's the best gift I could have given the feature on its tenth anniversary. Here's to the many great reviews to come.

Samir Mehta | April 7, 2009
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Erik Bates | April 7, 2009
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Scott Hardie | April 7, 2009
Adventureland is on my short list of movies to go out and see, but I rarely get out to see movies any more now that my job has changed, not that I was seeing so many before. It will be rented by year's end if not seen in a theater.

Twitterized movie reviews seems like a natural idea; Google tells me there are some other people doing it already. 140 characters sounds almost painful, though, for certain movies I want to say a lot about. But that's one reason why I made the change.

It's been ten years since The Matrix, which was my first "review." That movie was so incredible at the time and is almost forgotten now. I've never seen sequels retroactively ruin a good movie so thoroughly for so many people.

Amy Austin | April 8, 2009
Oh, I could not agree more -- I dreaded that the sequels would ruin it, and they so did.

Samir Mehta | April 8, 2009
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