I often use Amazon customer reviews to help me make purchasing decisions, and they have never yet led me wrong. Unfortunately Netflix customer reviews seem to be written by idiots. I've never read one that told me something interesting or useful that I didn't already know about the movie. And I just now read a review criticizing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for being silent! The reviewer accused them of forgoing sound for budget reasons and said it detracted from the movie! I give up.
(by the way, I decided that if I wanted to watch a crazy scary German expressionist horror movie, I should go to the source. Too bad it won't arrive until next week. This is the only downside to Netflix, I find: if you have an urge to watch a movie right now, you can't indulge that urge the way you can with a video store. You have to put it in your queue, send another movie back and wait for it to arrive. That could take days! Dr. Caligari won't wait!)
Netflix customer reviews can be pretty stupid but they look like sheer brilliance compared to user comments on youtube. If that's the future we really are doomed...
I've done the same capsule note on at least three different Mel Gibson films:
"After his wife is killed, Gibson goes on a cross country rampage to avenge her death."
Although I hate the "Leave Note" way that the mini-review changed. Does not work for me.
The comment I left last night seems to have been eaten, so here it is again:
Dr. Caligari is in the public domain, so you could just download it, e.g. from Google Video.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8455250375270835043&q=caligari