151 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen – Leonard Maltin (Harper Studio)

With Oscar season upon us, we thought it would be a good time to take a look at some of the movies you won’t be hearing about on the telecast. Between all the Avatars and Clooneys of the world, there are a host of smaller movies (or box-office duds) that are well deserving of your time and attention.

Or so says film critic Leonard Maltin, who would probably be a good judge, as he probably sees about a dozen movies a week in his job as a journalist and TV personality. Maltin’s latest book singles out films from the last 20 years that, unless you are an extreme movie aficionado, chances are that most of these selections never hit your radar.

FIlms like “The Door in the Floor” (Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger, Mimi Rogers, Bijou Phillips) or “The Great Buck Howard” (Tom Hanks, John Malkovich, Griffin Dunne, etc.) may not have made a big splash at your local cinema, but they are among Maltin’s picks as key flicks to go back and find. (Nearly every major actor is represented from Robert DeNiro to Meryl Streep to Leo DiCaprio and all the rest.)

The films are divided into roughly three categories; mainstream studio fare, foreign and independent films that often struggle for attention here and a few choice gems from the first half of cinematic history. Maltin rightly focuses most of his light on movies from the last 20 years. (As there are already many books that highlight pictures from the golden age of cinema.)

Of course, it’s hard to tell just how great the book is without sampling a host of the films that Maltin singles out for a revisit, but next time you are at Blockbuster or on Netflix, keep this book handy and see if one of Maltin’s picks might sound worthwhile even while it would pass your normal purview. Just be ready to fire up that old VHS machine in the garage, as many of these gems have never made the leap to DVD.

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