Welcome to FF Movie Reviews 

You will not find careful dissections of screenplays and camera angles and cinematography here.  No star ratings either.  You will find FF ratings.  What are they?  A little history…

Sometime in the 1990s I started adding an occasional quick and easy DVD review to my monthly newsletter, The F File.  The readers liked them and so they became a regular feature.  I’ve collected all I could find here (I was shocked at the hundreds of DVDs I’ve watched since I started the reviews) and will add new ones as I write them.

For those who don’t already know, the FF Rating system is gauged by use of the Fast-Forward button in increments of 10% of running time. If I FF through a tenth of the film (i.e., 9 minutes of a 90-min film), its FF Rating is 1. Thus, the lower the FF Rating, the higher my level of engagement. (Note, I didn’t say the better the film.  Crap can – and often does – engage me.) FF = 5 is the threshold of unwatchable.

Bail Factor: If I turn off a film at the halfway point, that’s an automatic 5. If I bail after only a quarter or so, that’s an automatic 7.5. Then I add how much FFing I did before shutdown.

Movie plot summaries abound on the web, so you don’t need me for that.

Why should you care what I think of a film?  Beats me.  I love a good story well told.  This may be sacrilege to cinemaphiles, but I have neither the time nor patience for drawn-out long shots of cars or horses traveling through beautiful scenery. The same goes for protracted car chases and fight scenes.  I have a life, I have other things to do, and I know filler when I see it.

Like the old lady said, “Where’s the beef?”  I came for beef, not for bun.

Your tastes may not jibe with mine, but if they do, I think you’ll find these bloviation-free reviews handy.  The FF=0 category contains many films I would watch again (and often have).  Occasionally, though, a film I hate will have a low FF rating where I resisted the FF button because I knew, just knew I’d miss something important if I used it.  Sometimes I was right, sometimes I was way wrong (as in Guy Richie’s Revolver.).

Let me stress once more, the FF rating is a level of engagement, not an objective critique of the film or the film maker.

How to use this site:  You can (a) look up the title in the alphabetical listing or (b) browse the reviews in the various FF categories.