Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of
film
A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...
s and the film medium. In general, film criticism can be divided into two categories:
journalistic
Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree. The word, a noun, applies to the occupation (profes ...
criticism
Criticism is the construction of a judgement about the negative qualities of someone or something. Criticism can range from impromptu comments to a written detailed response. , ''"the act of giving your opinion or judgment about the good or bad q ...
that appears regularly in
newspaper
A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background.
Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, sports a ...
s,
magazine
A magazine is a periodical publication, generally published on a regular schedule (often weekly or monthly), containing a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, purchase price, prepaid subscriptions, or by a combinatio ...
s and other popular mass-media outlets; and academic criticism by
film scholar
Film studies is an academic discipline that deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to cinema as an art form and a medium. It is sometimes subsumed within media studies and is often compared to television studies.
Fi ...
s who are informed by
film theory
Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for und ...
and are published in academic journals. Academic film criticism rarely takes the form of a review; instead it is more likely to analyse the film and its place in the history of its genre or in the whole of
film history
The history of film chronicles the development of a visual art form created using film technologies that began in the late 19th century.
The advent of film as an artistic medium is not clearly defined. However, the commercial, public scr ...
.
Film criticism is also labeled as a type of writing that perceives films as possible achievements and wishes to convey their differences, as well as the films being made in a level of quality that is satisfactory or unsatisfactory.
Film criticism is also associated with the journalistic type of criticism, which is grounded in the media's effects being developed, and journalistic criticism resides in standard structures such as newspapers. Journal articles pertaining to films served as representatives for the film critics who desired to increase the amount of communication about movies to a high degree that ascended above content that was normally featured in popular publications. The critics who work in the media are normally commissionaires who affect culture, since the judgments and choices of critics have the effect of influencing what audience members perceive about objects that are supplied to them, and critics are also able to influence how the audience members choose to think about objects that are supplied to them.
In the current era of history, film criticism is rich in having digital devices that allow films to be analyzed through visual and auditory methods that involve critical strategies of creativity that allow people to become immersed in film criticism. Film criticism is also associated with the cultural type of criticism, which is also referred to as academic criticism, and academic criticism is able to primarily make interpretations of films from the viewpoint of directors while the interpretations place emphasis on parallels that films have with previous works that were deemed to be of high quality.
History
Film was introduced in the late 19th century. The earliest artistic criticism of film emerged in the early 1900s. The first paper to serve as a critique of film came out of ''The Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal'', followed by the ''Bioscope'' in 1908.
Film is a relatively new form of art, in comparison to
music
Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...
,
literature
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...
and
painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ...
which have existed since ancient times. Early writing on film sought to argue that films could also be considered a form of art. In 1911,
Ricciotto Canudo
Ricciotto Canudo (; 2 January 1877, Gioia del Colle – 10 November 1923, Paris) was an early Italian film theoretician who lived primarily in France. In 1913 he published a bimonthly avant-garde magazine entitled ''Montjoie!'', promoting Cubism ...
wrote a manifesto proclaiming cinema to be the "Sixth Art" (later "Seventh Art"). For many decades after, film was still being accorded less prestige than longer-established art forms.
In Sweden, serious film criticism was spearheaded by
Bengt Idestam-Almquist, whom the
Swedish Film Institute
The Swedish Film Institute ( sv, Svenska Filminstitutet) was founded in 1963 to support and develop the Swedish film industry. The institute is housed in the ''Filmhuset'' building located in Gärdet, Östermalm in Stockholm. The building, comp ...
has called the ''father of Swedish film criticism''.
By the 1920s,
critic
A critic is a person who communicates an assessment and an opinion of various forms of creative works such as art, literature, music, cinema, theater, fashion, architecture, and food. Critics may also take as their subject social or governmen ...
s were analyzing film for its merit and value, and as more than just entertainment. The growing popularity of the medium caused major newspapers to start hiring film critics.
In the 1930s, the film industry saw audiences grow increasingly silent as films were now accompanied by sound. However, in the late 1930s audiences became influenced by print news sources reporting on movies and criticism became largely centered around audience reactions within the theaters.
In the decades of the 1930s and the 1940s, the type of criticism pertaining to films had to overcome some difficult challenges.
The first difficult challenge involves how film criticism in the 1930s decade didn't have any stable foundations to reside on, and film criticism also involved critics having vocabularies that were limited.
During the 1930s, the jobs of critics weren't perceived to be great and critics didn't earn high wages for their work.
The next difficult challenge involves the fact that the industry related to film even attempted to use intimidation as a way of making movie critics cease with reviewing films.
In the year of 1948, a critic named Eileen Arnot Robertson was forcibly removed from her job as a critic.
Despite the fact that she filed a lawsuit against the film industry, the film industry said that Robertson's firing didn't occur out of maliciousness.
These difficult challenges led to the existences of movie critics who had respect for films, and those new film critics sought to make film criticism be a respected job.
In the 1940s, new forms of criticism emerged. Essays analyzing films were written with a distinctive charm and style, and sought to persuade the reader to accept the critic's argument.
This trend brought film criticism into the mainstream, gaining the attention of many popular magazines; this eventually made film reviews and critiques a staple among most print media. As the decades passed, some critics gained fame, and a few became household names, among them
James Agee
James Rufus Agee ( ; November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for ''Time Magazine'', he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. ...
,
Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris (October 31, 1928 – June 20, 2012) was an American film critic. He was a leading proponent of the auteur theory of film criticism.
Early life
Sarris was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Greek immigrant parents, Themis (née Katav ...
,
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael (; June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for ''The New Yorker'' magazine from 1968 to 1991. Known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, Kael's opinions oft ...
, and more recently
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert beca ...
and
Peter Travers
Peter Joseph Travers (born ) is an American film critic, journalist, and television presenter. He reviews films for ABC News and previously served as a movie critic for ''People'' and ''Rolling Stone''. Travers also hosts the film interview prog ...
.
The film industry also got the chance to see that sound was able to influence how people behaved in movie theaters.
When people spoke or made other kinds of sounds, they would be causing disruptions that created difficulties for people to listen to the conversations that were occurring in films.
Audience members changed how they behaved in movie theaters, since they would shush people as a way of communicating the messages related to telling other people that they needed to be silent.
By keeping themselves in silence, audience members such as film critics were able to make all of their attention be on the movies that they were watching.
Journalistic criticism
Film
critic
A critic is a person who communicates an assessment and an opinion of various forms of creative works such as art, literature, music, cinema, theater, fashion, architecture, and food. Critics may also take as their subject social or governmen ...
s working for
newspaper
A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background.
Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, sports a ...
s,
magazine
A magazine is a periodical publication, generally published on a regular schedule (often weekly or monthly), containing a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, purchase price, prepaid subscriptions, or by a combinatio ...
s,
broadcast media
Broadcasting is the distribution of audio or video content to a dispersed audience via any electronic mass communications medium, but typically one using the electromagnetic spectrum ( radio waves), in a one-to-many model. Broadcasting began w ...
, and online publications mainly review new releases, although they also review older films.
An important task for these reviews is to help readers decide whether they want to see a particular film. A film review will typically explain the
premise
A premise or premiss is a true or false statement that helps form the body of an argument, which logically leads to a true or false conclusion. A premise makes a declarative statement about its subject matter which enables a reader to either agre ...
of the film before discussing its merits or flaws. The verdict is often summarized using a rating system, such as
5- or 4-star scales, academic-style grades, and pictograms (such as those used by the ''
San Francisco Chronicle
The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and M. H. de Young, Michael H. de ...
''). Film reviews are created with the purposes of making the characters, movie plots, and the directors be known in detailed descriptions to influence audience members into deciding if films need to be viewed or be ignored.
![Russ_Meyer_and_Roger_Ebert_by_Roger_Ebert](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Russ_Meyer_and_Roger_Ebert_by_Roger_Ebert.jpg)
Some well-known journalistic critics are
James Agee
James Rufus Agee ( ; November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for ''Time Magazine'', he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. ...
(''Time'', ''The Nation'');
Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby (July 27, 1924 – October 15, 2000) was an American film and theatre critic who served as the chief film critic for ''The New York Times'' from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in ...
(''The New York Times'');
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert beca ...
(''Chicago Sun-Times'');
Mark Kermode
Mark James Patrick Kermode (, ; ; born 2 July 1963) is an English film critic, musician, radio presenter, television presenter and podcaster. He is the chief film critic for ''The Observer'', contributes to the magazine ''Sight & Sound'', prese ...
(BBC, ''The Observer'');
James Berardinelli
James Berardinelli (born September 25, 1967) is an American film critic and former engineer. His reviews are mainly published on his blog ''ReelViews.'' Approved as a critic by the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, he has published two collections of r ...
;
Philip French
Philip Neville French Order of the British Empire, OBE (28 August 1933 – 27 October 2015) was an English film critic and radio producer. French began his career in journalism in the late 1950s, before eventually becoming a BBC Radio prod ...
(''The Observer'');
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael (; June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for ''The New Yorker'' magazine from 1968 to 1991. Known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, Kael's opinions oft ...
(''The New Yorker'');
Manny Farber
Emanuel Farber (February 20, 1917 – August 18, 2008) was an American painter, film critic and writer. Often described as "iconoclastic",Grimes, William (August 19, 2008) ''New York Times''Kiderra, Inga (August 21, 2008Obituary: Artist and Crit ...
(''The New Republic'', ''Time'', ''The Nation'');
Peter Bradshaw
Peter Bradshaw (born 19 June 1962) is a British writer and film critic. He has been chief film critic at ''The Guardian'' since 1999, and is a contributing editor at ''Esquire''.
Early life and education
Bradshaw was educated at Haberdashers ...
(''The Guardian'');
Michael Phillips (''Chicago Tribune'');
Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris (October 31, 1928 – June 20, 2012) was an American film critic. He was a leading proponent of the auteur theory of film criticism.
Early life
Sarris was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Greek immigrant parents, Themis (née Katav ...
(''The Village Voice'');
Joel Siegel
Joel Steven Siegel (July 7, 1943 – June 29, 2007) was an American film critic for the ABC morning news show ''Good Morning America'' for over 25 years. The winner of multiple Emmy Awards, Siegel also worked as a radio disc jockey and an adverti ...
(''Good Morning America'');
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum (born February 27, 1943) is an American film critic and author. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for ''The Chicago Reader'' from 1987 to 2008, when he retired. He has published and edited numerous books about cinema and has ...
(''Chicago Reader''); and
Christy Lemire (''What The Flick?!'').
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert beca ...
and
Gene Siskel
Eugene Kal Siskel (January 26, 1946 – February 20, 1999) was an American film critic and journalist for the ''Chicago Tribune''. Along with colleague Roger Ebert, he hosted a series of movie review programs on television from 1975 until his d ...
popularised the practice of reviewing films via a television program, in the show ''
Siskel & Ebert At the Movies'', which became syndicated in the 1980s. Both critics had established their careers in print media, and continued to write reviews for newspapers during the run of their television show.
Format for film critics to write film criticisms
Research says that there are ways in how film critics are able to write criticisms that involve critical discussions containing rationality.
When critics are looking for film criticisms that are factual, they must not behave with excessive optimism or be too demanding.
Creations and criticisms are activities that humans participate in, and these activities cannot be substituted out for an objective list of morals to be utilized.
Humans are restrained by the fact that criticisms cannot communicate messages for forms of artwork, and only the artworks can communicate their messages.
The second way in how film critics are able to write criticisms that involve critical discussions containing rationality involves critics analyzing their reasons for not liking specific movies, and critics must discover if they dislike movies for the same criteria that caused them to initially dislike specific movies.
That requires utilizing criticism that is analytical and thorough with detail.
The third way in how film critics are able to write criticisms that involve critical discussions containing rationality involves critics making blatant statements that are scientific in regards to the workings of films, and how the films are able to affect people.
In fact, viewers can watch films to see if they are affected by the movies in the same way that the film critics were affected by them.
The fourth way in how film critics are able to write criticisms that involve critical discussions containing rationality involves critics being less arrogant when they want they perceptions of films to be talked about, and critics must be aware of criticisms that have been published.
The critics who want to argue must base their arguments in criticisms that have been stated by other critics.
The fourth way in how film critics are able to write criticisms that involve critical discussions containing rationality pertains to critics moving away from the idea that artwork such as a film shall have clear meanings.
Instead, critics must view artwork such as films to be the results of working hard, many hours of thinking, and ideas being compromised for meanings to not be clear.
This research concludes that film critics must repeatedly view films as a way of studying them, if they desire to write thorough reviews on those particular films.
Secondly, film critics have the task of making sure that they are highly informed about the film and film critics are also responsible for initiating the discussions about the films.
Film critics are also responsible for knowing the creators of the films.
Thirdly, film critics must blatantly state their own biases and preferences without associating them with any theories.
Fourthly, film critics must appreciate the films that are given positive criticisms and film critics must not be ungrateful towards those films.
Finally, a film critic must enjoy the movies that they are criticizing.
In this specific regard, a film critic must also want to make their reviews persuade other people watch the movies that the film critic has criticized.
Film critics and audience members
In the academic field of films and cinema, several studies involving research have discovered a positive connection between film critics evaluating films and how well the films perform with audience members.
Also, studies involving research in the fields of films and cinema have discovered a connection between film critics evaluating films and audience members having interests or no interests in viewing those films.
Based in the perspective of an audience member, a review serves as more than an object that is useful for making decisions.
Listening to a review from a critic, watching a critic's review, and reading a critic's review are all ways in which the review is useful to an audience member.
The critic's review is able to be referenced in conversations where audience members communicate with other individuals, and audience members can communicate messages about the artistic film that was critically examined or connect the criticism to problems that occur in society.
Online film criticism
Aggregators
Websites such as
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
and
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...
seek to improve the usefulness of film reviews by compiling them and assigning a score to each in order to gauge the general reception a film receives. Another aggregator is the
Movie Review Query Engine
The Movie Review Query Engine also known as MRQE, is an online index of movie reviews. Registered users are able to access movie-specific forums and provide their own reviews. The site aggregates reviews, news, interviews, and other material assoc ...
, which is a large data storage on the internet that stores interviews, reviews about movies, news, and other kinds of materials that pertain to specific films.
These areas of storage are not intended to help people find specific films or movie content that has aired on television, but the storages are able to help people find reliable film criticisms that can be used as readings for students.
Online film critics
Blogs are a good example to view in relation to how the internet has grown to where social networks and live chats exist alongside websites such as
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
where people can post their own content.
That is because blogging has created new ways for people to make themselves engage with cinematic movies.
People who engage themselves with movies choose to participate in various forms of film criticism by using video or DVD clips from YouTube that are placed alongside parts of other films for the sound effects or images from the other films to be used in criticizing the sounds or images that pertain to the YouTube clips that are being criticized.
Film critics are also reviewers who are amateurs on websites such as IMDb.
Also, many postings from amateur film critics are on IMDb.
Some websites specialize in narrow aspects of film reviewing. For instance, there are sites that focus on specific content advisories for parents to judge a film's suitability for children. Others focus on a religious perspective (e.g. CAP Alert). Still others highlight more esoteric subjects such as the depiction of
science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...
in fiction films. One such example is ''Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics'' by
Intuitor
Intuitor is a website promoting creative learning as both a method of enlightenment and a cultural theme in its own right. Created in 1996, two of its earliest features were instructions for the founder's own four-handed chess variant Forchess a ...
. Some online niche websites provide comprehensive coverage of the independent sector; usually adopting a style closer to print journalism. They tend to prohibit advertisement and offer uncompromising opinions free of any commercial interest. Their film critics normally have an academic film background.
The
Online Film Critics Society
The Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) is an international professional association of online film journalists, historians and scholars who publish their work on the World Wide Web. The organization was founded in January 1997 by Harvey S. Karten ...
, an international professional association of Internet-based cinema reviewers, consists of writers from all over the world, while
New York Film Critics Online
The New York Film Critics Online (NYFCO) is an organization founded by Harvey Karten in 2000 composed of Internet film critics based in New York City. The group meets once a year, in December, for voting on its annual NYFCO Awards.
2001 Various ...
members handle reviews in the New York tri-state area.
Online film criticism has provided online film critics with challenges related to journalism's purpose changing on the internet.
For example, critics must contend with the drawback of too many critics being online to the extent of preventing critics from writing original statements.
Critics can write original statements online, but there are websites that will steal their ideas and not give credit to the credit.
Another challenge in film criticism pertains to film critics being pressured into writing reviews that are hasty, since users of the internet will give their attention to other topics if film critics don't post movie reviews at quick paces.
User-submitted reviews
Community-driven review sites, that allow internet users to submit personal movie reviews, have allowed the common movie goer to express their opinion on films. Many of these sites allow users to rate films on a 0 to 10 scale, while some rely on the star rating system of 1–5, 0–5 or 0–4 stars. The votes are then converted into an overall rating and ranking for any particular film. Some of these community driven review sites include
Letterboxd
Letterboxd is an online social networking service co-founded by Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow in 2011. It was launched as a social app focused on sharing opinions about, and love of film, and is maintained by a small team in Auckland, New ...
, Reviewer, Movie Attractions,
Flixster
Flixster is an American social-networking movie website for discovering new movies, learning about movies, and meeting others with similar tastes in movies, currently owned by parent company Fandango. The formerly independent site, allows users t ...
,
FilmCrave
FilmCrave is an online movie social network that allows users to write movie reviews, share movie lists, watch trailers and interact with other members. Founded by three college friends in February 2007, the site was launched in August 2007. Fil ...
,
Flickchart
Flickchart is a Florida-based movie-ranking and social networking website.
Description
Launched in September 2009, Flickchart is the brainchild of web programmer Jeremy Thompson and web designer Nathan Chase. The impetus behind the site's crea ...
and
Everyone's a Critic.
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
and
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...
aggregate both scores from accredited critics and those submitted by users.
On these online review sites, users generally only have to register with the site in order to submit reviews. This means that they are a form of
open access poll
An open-access poll is a type of opinion poll in which a nonprobability sample of participants self-select into participation. The term includes call-in, mail-in, and some online polls.
The most common examples of open-access polls ask people t ...
, and have the same advantages and disadvantages; notably, there is no guarantee that they will be a representative sample of the film's audience. In some cases, online review sites have produced wildly differing results to scientific polling of audiences. Likewise, reviews and ratings for many movies can greatly differ between the different review sites, even though there are certain movies that are well-rated (or poorly-rated) across the board.
Research has found that moviegoers are inclined to leave reviews for films that aren't available in movie theaters, and the amount of reviews will decrease as the films earn more money each week.
When the amount of money that films earn in movie theaters is increasing, the expected quantity of movie reviews that were posted at prior points in time also increases.
This ends up making individuals experience increases in their desires to write movie reviews about films that are earning high quantities of money.
When movies are given high ratings, those high ratings are able to persuade viewers of movies to watch other films that share aspects of the movies that viewers prefer to see.
The explanations for why movies are given high ratings are able to reach online groups of people who watch movies, and the explanations for movies having high ratings are explained through the usage of reviews that are posted in those online groups.
Academic film criticism
More often known as
film theory
Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for und ...
or
film studies
Film studies is an academic discipline that deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to cinema as an art form and a medium. It is sometimes subsumed within media studies and is often compared to television studies.
...
, academic critique explores cinema beyond journalistic film reviews. These film critics try to examine why film works, how it works aesthetically or politically, what it means, and what effects it has on people. Rather than write for mass-market publications their articles are usually published in scholarly journals and texts which tend to be affiliated with university presses; or sometimes in up-market magazines.
Most academic criticism of film often follows a similar format. They usually include summaries of the plot of the film to either refresh the plot to the reader or reinforce an idea of repetition in the film's genre. After this, there tends to be discussions about the cultural context, major themes and repetitions, and details about the legacy of the film.
Academic film criticism, or film studies can also be taught in academia, and is featured in many California colleges in the United States due to its established home of film:
Hollywood
Hollywood usually refers to:
* Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California
* Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States
Hollywood may also refer to:
Places United States
* Hollywood District (disambiguation)
* Hollywood, ...
. Some of these colleges include
University of California, Davis
The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a public land-grant research university near Davis, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The institut ...
,
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
,
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...
,
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
, as well as many other colleges across the world.
Academic criticism is typically divided and taught in the form of many different disciplines that tackle critique in different manors. These can include:
* Formalism, that analyzes the way that things are done and the appearance of their form or shape.
* Structuralism, that examines the way that movies are sequenced, have a dedicated style, and the way that language and art itself can create meaning.
* Historical, a form of criticism that doesn't look at the direct things being said, but the culture and surrounding environments of a given film. The historical critic will create meaning from something that is not explicitly stated or shown in the film.
* Psychoanalysis, that breaks down the unconscious that one can experience while observing a given film.
* Political and economic, which not only looks into how economics and politics are depicted directly inside the film, but also how it affects the film's creation, marketing, screening, and sale.
Academic film criticism is associated with formalism, which involves visual aspects and the rules regarding how they are organized as if they were forms of artwork.
Formalism also involves stages of development occurring in an orderly manner, such as learning easy instructions before learning difficult ones.
Stages of development in formalism also involved organized stages of development that are orderly, and one example involves people learning simple instructions before they have to follow instructions that involve complexity.
Academic film criticism is also associated with structuralism, which involves controlling a situation in an attempt to make it be coherent, and all the aspects of a situation are assumed to be in a structured order.
Academic film criticism tackles many aspects of film making and production as well as distribution. These disciplines include camera work, digitalization, lighting, and sound. Narratives, dialogues, themes, and genres are among many other things that academic film critics take into consideration and evaluate when engaging in critique.
Some notable academic film critics include
André Bazin
André Bazin (; 18 April 1918 – 11 November 1958) was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist.
Bazin started to write about film in 1943 and was a co-founder of the renowned film magazine '' Cahiers du cinéma'' in 1951, ...
,
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard ( , ; ; 3 December 193013 September 2022) was a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as Franà ...
and
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut ( , ; ; 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was a French film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. After a career of more tha ...
(all writers for ''
Cahiers du Cinéma
''Cahiers du Cinéma'' (, ) is a French film magazine co-founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca.Itzkoff, Dave (9 February 2009''Cahiers Du Cinéma Will Continue to Publish''The New York TimesMacnab, Ge ...
'');
Kristin Thompson
Kristin Thompson (born 1950) is an American film theorist and author whose research interests include the close formal analysis of films, the history of film styles, and "quality television," a genre akin to art film. She wrote two scholarly books ...
,
David Bordwell
David Jay Bordwell (; born July 23, 1947) is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including ''Narration in th ...
, and
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (russian: Сергей Михайлович Ðйзенштейн, p=sʲɪrˈɡʲej mʲɪˈxajlÉ™vʲɪtÉ• ɪjzʲɪnˈʂtʲejn, 2=Sergey Mikhaylovich Eyzenshteyn; 11 February 1948) was a Soviet film director, screenw ...
. Godard, Truffaut and Eisenstein were also film directors.
The critics that participated in academic film criticism during the years between 2002 and 2006 had written reviews pertaining to the fact that they disapproved of modern films that were in the horror genre.
In the year 2002, a critic named Reynold Humphries made his own discussion in ''The American Horror Film'' reach its end when he said that the horror genre's films were not good, and Humphries also stated that films in the horror genre weren't enjoyable.
A critic named Kendall Phillips wrote a book titled ''Projected Fears'', and ending the book during the year 2006 involved Phillips saying that American horror films had fallen into the cycle of being movies that had predictability.
Film theory is also part of academic film criticism, since two main film theories have been created.
The first main film theory is the part-whole theory.
This theory pertains to
Eisenstein's philosophy that segments of films are not artistic works on their own, and they are just unemotional aspects of reality.
When those segments of films are sequenced in the form of a montage, then the films are artwork.
The second film theory is that films are related to reality.
Bazin Bazin may refer to
Places
*Bazin, Zanjan, a village in Iran
*Gazan Bazin, Hormozgan, a village in Iran
*Kingdom of Bazin, a medieval Beja polity
*Bazin, Hungarian name of Pezinok, in Slovakia
Other
*Bazin (surname) Bazin is a French surname of Ger ...
's philosophy involves movies being connected to the real world, which is reality.
Green film criticism
Green film criticism is defined as eco-cinecriticism.
This pertains to the specific film critics who are interested in environmental types of films.
The cinematic counterpart to writings about nature is the creation of documentaries on nature and films that are about wild creatures.
Issues and controversies
Influence
Film critics are able to be influencers in the circumstances of persuading moviegoers to view or not view in the beginning weeks of movies being available for people to view them.
Research has found that negative and positive film reviews are connected to the amounts of money that films earn in box offices over a duration of eight weeks of time, which displays the fact that film critics are influential towards how well films perform in box offices.
Film critics are able to influence the choices of people in the public who decide on whether or not they will view a film.
Film critics frequently receive invitations to early viewings of movies before the movies are available to all of the moviegoers who aren't film critics, and viewing films at early points in time allows the film critics to write film reviews that are influential to other moviegoers.
Film critics have access to information regarding the earliest phases of films, unlike the public, and the earliest phases of films are when film critics are the only reliable sources of information pertaining to the movies that will be in theaters.
Research has also displayed the fact that film critics desire to give moviegoers encouragement towards viewing films that are worth viewing while they also display innovation, instead of viewing movies that are simplistic.
However, in recent years, there has been a growing belief in the film industry that critic aggregators (especially
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
) are increasing the collective influence of film critics. The underperformance of several films in 2017 was blamed on their low scores on Rotten Tomatoes. This has led to studies such as one commissioned by
20th Century Fox
20th Century Studios, Inc. (previously known as 20th Century Fox) is an American film production company headquartered at the Fox Studio Lot in the Century City area of Los Angeles. As of 2019, it serves as a film production arm of Walt Dis ...
claiming that younger viewers give the website more credibility than the major studio
marketing
Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...
, which undercuts its effectiveness.
Today, fan-run film analysis websites like Box Office Prophets, CineBee and Box Office Guru routinely factor more into the opinions of the general public on films produced.
Controversies
Research says that academic studies pertaining to films had a thorough histiography pertaining to films, which also included different styles of films throughout history.
However, the academic studies almost made film criticism reach its end.
The academic type of writing pertaining to films had created knowledge, which ended up appearing in areas that had been useful for writing film criticisms in a traditional style.
Writing about academic films puts emphasis on generalized statements that can be verified.
Writing academic films also involves film critics preferring to view films that are typical, instead of viewing films that are bizarre.
That is because of the fact that ordinary kinds of films can be reviewed with generalized statements that can be verified.
The "undulating curve of shifting expectations"
The "undulating curve of shifting expectations" (UCoSE) refers to both the title of a recurring entertainment industry feature in ''
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
New York may also refer to:
Film and television
* '' ...
'' magazine by cultural critic Adam Sternbergh and also to a concept of media analysis co-developed by writer
Emily Nussbaum
Emily Nussbaum (born February 20, 1966) is an American television critic. She served as the television critic for ''The New Yorker'' from 2011 until 2019. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Early life
Nussbaum was born in the ...
.
Female representation
There have been many complaints against the film-criticism industry for its underrepresentation of women.
A study of the top critics on Rotten Tomatoes shows that 91 per cent of writers for movie or entertainment magazines and websites are men, as are 90 per cent of those for trade publications, 80 per cent of critics for general interest magazines like ''
Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...
'', and 70 per cent of reviewers for radio formats such as
NPR
National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...
.
Writing for ''
The Atlantic
''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science.
It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...
'', Kate Kilkenny argued that women were better represented in film criticism before the rise of the Internet. In the past, when film was considered less prestigious than visual art and literature, it was easier for women to break into film criticism. In the year 1929, Iris Barry was a female film critic from Britain.
When Barry lived in London, she earned money from being a writer for magazines, a newspaper, and periodical articles.
Barry wrote film criticisms that discussed films that were made in Britain, films that were made in America, and Barry only wrote film criticisms on a selective amount of German movies.
Barry also wrote film criticisms for French movies that were made as experiments.
Barry wrote film criticisms with a critical amount of analysis.
Judith Crist
Judith Crist (; May 22, 1922 – August 7, 2012) was an American film critic and academic.
She appeared regularly on the ''Today'' show from 1964 to 1973 Martin, Douglas (August 8, 2012)"Judith Crist, Zinging and Influential Film Critic, ...
and
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael (; June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for ''The New Yorker'' magazine from 1968 to 1991. Known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, Kael's opinions oft ...
were two of the most influential film critics of the 1960s and 1970s. The Internet led to a decline in jobs at small newspapers where women were more likely to review films, whereas the more male-dominated jobs at major newspapers survived better. The Internet also encouraged a growth in niche review websites that were even more male-dominated than older media. Kilkenny also suggested that the shortage of female critics was related to the shortage of female opinion columnists.
Clem Bastow, culture writer at ''
The Guardian Australia
''Guardian Australia'' is the Australian website of the British global online and print newspaper, ''The Guardian''.
Available solely in an online format, the newspaper's launch was led by Katharine Viner in time for the 2013 Australian fede ...
'', discussed the possible effects of this on the critical response to the 2015 film ''
The Intern'', which received mixed reviews from critics:
The critical response to ''The Intern'' was fascinating. There's a subset of male critics that clearly see Nancy Meyers as code for chick flick and react with according bile. What's very interesting, though, is that I think female critics, working in an industry that is coded as very male, if not macho, often feel the need to go hard on certain films for women, presumably because they worry that they'll be dismissed, critically speaking, if they praise a film like ''The Intern'' as though they're only reviewing it favorably because they're women.
Matt Reynolds of ''
Wired
''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Fra ...
'' pointed out that "men tend to look much more favorably on films with more masculine themes, or male leading actors." On online review sites such as
IMDb
IMDb (an abbreviation of Internet Movie Database) is an online database of information related to films, television series, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, ...
, this leads to skewed, imbalanced review results as 70 per cent of reviewers on the site are men.
A study using
Johanson analysis
Johanson analysis, developed by film critic MaryAnn Johanson, provides a method to evaluate the representation of women and girls in fiction. The analysis evaluates media on criteria that include the basic representation of women, female agency, p ...
was used evaluate the representation of women in 270 films.
Johanson complied statistics for the year 2015 on how having a female protagonist affected a movie, with the following results:
# 22% of 2015's movies had female protagonists.
# Critics are slightly more likely to rate a film highly if it represents women well.
# Mainstream moviegoers are not turned off by films with female protagonists.
# Movies that represent women well are just as likely to be profitable as movies that don't, and are less risky as business propositions.
Salary
As of 2021, movie critics earned a yearly average salary of $63,474.
As of 2013, American film critics earned about US$82,000 a year.
Newspaper and magazine critics made $27,364-$49,574.
Online movie critics earned $2-$200 per review.
TV critics made up to $40,000-$60,000 per month.
See also
*
Prestige picture
*
List of film critics
Film critics analyze and evaluate film.
They can be divided into journalistic critics who write for newspapers, and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic critics who are informed by film theory and publish in journals.
Notable journal ...
*
List of film journals and magazines
Film periodicals combine discussion of individual films, genres and directors with in-depth considerations of the medium and the conditions of its production and reception. Their articles contrast with film reviewing in newspapers and magazines whi ...
*
List of films considered the best
This is a list of films considered the best in national and international surveys of critics and the public.
Some surveys focus on all films, while others focus on a particular genre or country. Voting systems differ, and some surveys suffer ...
*
List of films considered the worst
The films listed below have been cited by a variety of notable critics in varying media sources as being among the worst films ever made. Examples of such sources include Metacritic, Roger Ebert's list of most-hated films, ''The Golden Turkey ...
* ''
For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism'', a 2009 documentary film
References
Further reading
Peter Bradshaw gives adviceto young, aspiring, would-be film critics (''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'', 8 July 2008)
* Haberski, Raymond J. Jr. ''It's Only a Movie!: Film and Critics in American Culture'',
University Press of Kentucky
The University Press of Kentucky (UPK) is the scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and was organized in 1969 as successor to the University of Kentucky Press. The university had sponsored scholarly publication since 1943. In 194 ...
, 2001.
*
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. ''Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See'', A Cappella Books, 2000.
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