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Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of and the film medium. In general, film criticism can be divided into two categories: Academic criticism by film studies, who study the composition of film theory and publish their findings and essays in books and journals, and general Journalism criticism that appears regularly in press , and other popular mass-media outlets. 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, the industry and film history as a whole.
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. (2025). 9780203817315, Routledge. ISBN 9780203817315 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.
Film is a relatively new form of art, in comparison to music, literature and painting 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 wrote a manifesto proclaiming cinema to be the "Sixth Art" (later "Seventh Art").Giovanni Dotoli, Ricciotto Canudo ou le cinéma comme art, Preface by Jean-Louis Leutrat, Fasano-Paris, Schena-Didier Érudition, 1999 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 has called the father of Swedish film criticism.Forslund, Bengt (2012). "Bengt Idestam-Almquist". Swedish Film Database (in Swedish). Retrieved 10 September 2020.
By the 1920s, 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 did not 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 did not 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 did not 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, Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, and more recently Roger Ebert and Peter Travers.
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.
Some well-known journalistic critics are James Agee ( Time, The Nation); Vincent Canby ( The New York Times); Roger Ebert ( Chicago Sun-Times); Mark Kermode (BBC, The Observer); James Berardinelli; Philip French ( The Observer); Pauline Kael ( The New Yorker); Manny Farber ( The New Republic, Time, The Nation); Peter Bradshaw ( The Guardian); Michael Phillips ( Chicago Tribune); Andrew Sarris ( The Village Voice); Joel Siegel ( Good Morning America); Jonathan Rosenbaum ( Chicago Reader); and Christy Lemire ( What The Flick?!).
Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel 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.
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 in fiction films. One such example is Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics by Intuitor. 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, an international professional association of Internet-based cinema reviewers, consists of writers from all over the world, while New York Film Critics Online 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 author. 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 do not post movie reviews quickly.
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, 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 are not 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.
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 because they are located near the home of the United States film industry: Hollywood. Some of these colleges include University of California, Davis, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, Stanford University, 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 manners. These can include:
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, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut (all writers for Cahiers du Cinéma); Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell, and Sergei Eisenstein. 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's philosophy involves movies being connected to the real world, which is reality.
However, in recent years, there has been a growing belief in the film industry that critic aggregators (especially Rotten Tomatoes) 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 claiming that younger viewers give the website more credibility than the major studio Movie marketing, 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.
Writing for The Atlantic, 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 and Pauline Kael 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, 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 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, this leads to skewed, imbalanced review results as 70 per cent of reviewers on the site are men.
A study using Johanson analysis 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:
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.
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