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NathanBates

nathanbates
Cinema Addict - 2435 Film Ratings
Member Since: 09 Jul 2017
Location: Virginia, USA
TCI: not enough ratings
Films in Common: 0
Not in Your Top 1000 TCIs
Bio: My personal web site is at
https://sites.google.com/site/nathanbatesfilms/index
(I keep a "Greatest Films" list there, as I'm trying to watch most -- if not all -- of the 1001+ Movies You Must See Before You Die and the Criterion Collection)



I generally rate movies 1-5, so I just multiply that out on the 100 scale:
5/100: Excellent, well worth watching again and again
4/80: Pretty good
3/60: Average [general rating]
2/40: Pretty bad, but with some redeeming characteristics
1/20: Terrible; not worth watching ever again


Top 10 Movies:
1. Citizen Kane
2. Throne of Blood
3. Star Wars: A New Hope
4. Le Samourai
5. The Magicians
6. Stagecoach
7. Los Olvidados
8. Rear Window
9. The Third Man
10. North by Northwest


Comfort Movies:
1. Camp Nowhere
2. Midnight Madness
3. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
4. Tremors
5. Rat Race


Worst Movies I've Seen:
1. The Five (2010)
2. Percy Jackson II: Sea of Monsters
3. Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief
4. Radioland Murders
5. Into the Storm

more Recent Ratings

60 35% Caged (1950) - Rated 17 Apr 2024
"The original Nurse Rached as a women's prison guard. In a somewhat daring move for the studio, we question what a prison should be: a place for punishment for criminals, or a place for reformation. Almost seventy-five years later, we still haven't found what works. This has good performances from the whole cast, but sometimes the scenarios pull their punches and sometimes they're just ridiculous."
60 35% Stage Fright (1950) - Rated 16 Apr 2024
"White the plot here isn't quite a riddle wrapped in an enigma like Hitchcock's others, it's the characters that make this one so memorable. Dietrich is amazing as a recently-widowed diva (she intentionally mixes up her maid's name because she can), and Sim steals almost every scene he's in. (If I'm AH's daughter, I'd hate him forever for casting me as "Chubby," though.) Without those characterizations, the plodding police work and the improbability of it all would be just too much."
60 35% My Little Loves (1974) - Rated 15 Apr 2024
"I usually love "growing up in a small town" films; here we actually have two (or three if you count Girls Town). It's a nice coming-of-age film, although it lacks the humor of Amarcord and it really could have been some ten to twenty minutes shorter without losing much. Like Eustache's Mother, this feels like it's highlighting portions of the director's prior life, surprisingly doing so without much sentimentality."
80 78% They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) - Rated 14 Apr 2024
"I don't know how, but I wound up with a cramp in the middle of the movie. (Yowza!) Although there are a handful of scenes that really could have been cut, it's quite an amazing mix of tension (and even terror) and ridiculousness, and certainly worth watching once."
60 35% Mommie Dearest (1981) - Rated 12 Apr 2024
"After seeing the Groucho Marx eyebrows and no scenery left unchewed, you think this is a comedy. But then you think, well, maybe a woman who feels like she has been fighting her way to the top would be that obsessed, and then it becomes a tragedy. Sometimes we think we want the dirt on movie stars or royalty or such; there's still some floor-scrubbing in their glitzy lifestyles."
60 35% Personal Shopper (2016) - Rated 10 Apr 2024
"This starts out incredibly dull, then starts to get slightly interesting, then turns into a bizarre fetish/horror flick (as half the audience says, "Wait, is this Twi--?"), and then ... it ends without a lot of resolution. Was it good? I don't know. Stewart's performance was mostly fine, but the too-loose storyline never really grabbed me."
60 35% Defending Your Life (1991) - Rated 09 Apr 2024
"Having just read The Divine Comedy, I was looking forward to another take on the after-death experience. I'll buy that one stands in judgment; the criteria here seem rather haphazardly chosen. And while Brooks is certainly funny, I can't take him seriously enough as a romantic lead. I was laughing throughout (fav scenes are the prior lives and the ending Frogger sequence) but there's not enough here for it to be a favorite."
60 35% Born to Be Bad (1950) - Rated 08 Apr 2024
"Now that's a femme fatale. Fontaine does well as the beautiful black widow spider, luring in men to get what she wants. The casting is strong, but there's just something a little lacking -- for a love triangle, there's not quite the amount of passion one would expect. And in an era where the bad were always punished, this had a surprisingly upbeat ending."
40 5% The Mother and the Whore (1973) - Rated 06 Apr 2024
"I can only imagine how shocking -- scandalous -- this must have been when first released. It turns out that nothing says "French New Wave" better than an overly-long set of lectures about sex and philosophy and some other things in between. It certainly was a relationship I wanted to end much sooner."
80 78% The Exorcist (1973) - Rated 06 Apr 2024
"Glad to have gotten this one over with. The tension is nicely layered with slower parts (although, somewhat strangely, those hospital scenes were almost as scary as the possession ones). Personally, I would have liked a little more depth to the wavering-faith-of-the-priest storyline, but pure horror fans probably would have found that boring."