Halliwell's The Movies That Matter

8 / 10

In the Internet Age, where just about everything about any film can be found from the IMDb or by doing a Google search, you have to wonder: Is there still a place for printed film encyclopaedias?

The marketplace is dominated by several publications, updated annually: The Virgin Film Guide, The Time Out Film Guide, The Radio Times Guide to Films, and Halliwell's Film & Video Guide. The latter was started by Leslie Halliwell, a film buff interested in the Golden Era of film. After his death, John Walker took over the editing duties and kept most of Halliwell's material, adding his own and updating existing reviews.

As the years passed, the books became bigger, with the 2007 edition weighing about 5lbs and with a small typeface. Realising that this trend could not continue with thousands more films being released every year, the guide has been revamped, trimmed down and written in a larger font. Now edited by David Gritten, Halliwell's - The Movies That Matter, includes information on about 3000 films and six specially-written articles for this issue.

I've always found Halliwell's publications to be the more highbrow of the film guides available - they are notoriously stingy with the top 4-star rating - but this is no bad thing as I, for one, don't want to see a dumbing-down of film criticism.

Halliwell's - The Movies That Matter is very readable and informative, even if I don't agree with everything that the contributors write or how certain movies are rated (One star for The Exorcist??!).

I still think there's a market for printed film guides, just as there is for newspapers - they are more fun to flick through and you're not distracted by emails or adverts. This is a welcome addition to a long-running series of film reference books and it's nice to see it move with the times. David Gritten is an excellent editor and film writer, which he proves in his articles. This is a valuable resource and a good read, updating the previous Hallliwell editions, though those wanting a comprehensive film encyclopaedia should look elsewhere, perhaps Time Out or Radio Times.

Your Opinions and Comments

I gave up on Halliwell after the 2003 Film Guide, when the layout became three columns and the typeface got too small to read comfortably. Leslie Halliwell (who was ITV's network film buyer) was a good old-fashioned film buff who would wax lyrical about the movies he loved but skip over the films he didn't. Sadly, after his death, the editing of his annual tombstone tomes the Film Guide and Filmgoers' Companion passed to lesser hands and much of the more interesting content was dumped in favour of packing greater amounts of content into a limited space.It strikes me the intelligent thing to do with a film guide would be to publish it in encyclopaedic format - perhaps covering each decade in a dedicated volume and then publishing a yearly supplement with an updated index for the whole work.

posted by Mark Oates on 4/3/2011 03:26