Guide to Film Criticism: A Brief History of Film Criticism

Film criticism is the art of analyzing and evaluating film and television in written form. Film criticism can include plot recaps, critiques of performances and visual and aural aesthetics, character analyses, and commentary on the film’s political and cultural context. Film scholars, movie critics, and culture and entertainment journalists write criticism for various publications, including scholarly journals, magazines, free weeklies, daily newspapers, online publications, and industry trade publications.

Film criticism serves multiple purposes in both academic and commercial contexts.

• Information: Criticism informs moviegoers about a film's content and perceived quality and can help potential audiences decide whether or not to purchase tickets.
• Press: Widely-published criticism can reach demographics both within and beyond the film’s intended audience.
• Culture: Film critics may become tastemakers and established cultural vanguards in the world of cinema.
• Posterity: Film criticism creates a historical record of the film industry for future studies.

The most heavily disseminated film criticism tends to be penned by professional critics with careers dedicated to film analysis. Many of these critics have staff positions at publications and watch hundreds of movies per year, although they may not opt to review all of them. Film reviews are typically between 600 and 1,200 words.

In the academic world, film criticism tends to fall to scholars who have dedicated their work to the world of cinema. Academic film critics are not necessarily practitioners who teach in a film production department—they might be part of an English, journalism, sociology, or anthropology department. College humanities programs may have a separate film studies department dedicated exclusively to the study of cinema.

Film criticism has existed for as long as film has been a form of mass media.

• Early beginnings: Examples of film criticism date back to the late 1800s, but it was not until the early 1900s that publications like The Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal and the Bioscope began to include full-text film reviews as a regular feature.
• Rise of the critic: Over the twentieth century, several film critics rose to national prominence, both for their astute writing and occasionally audacious criticism. Particularly famous critics include Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Manny Farber, Peter Travers, Gene Siskel, and Roger Ebert.
• Academia: Many universities now include film studies or media studies as part of a broader humanities curriculum. Academic film critics often focus on iconoclastic auteurs and art films, although some also opt to analyze box office blockbusters. History's particularly famous academic film critics include Sergei Eisenstein, David Bordwell, and Kristin Thompson, all of whom are also filmmakers. The academic journal Cahiers du Cinéma featured the works of academic critics Jean-Luc Godard, André Bazin, and François Truffaut.

The phrase "film criticism" can apply to academic articles and short reviews designed for mass audiences. The term "film theory" applies exclusively to the academic study of film, which approaches criticism as part of a broader context of a film’s legacy and its connection to film history. Most academic film publications are far longer than a newspaper review, but notably smaller audiences consume them—sometimes limited to fellow film theorists.

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