Film criticism

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 the film came out of The Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal, followed by the Bioscope in 1908.[8]

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").[9] For many decades after, film was still being accorded less prestige than longer-established art forms.[10] In Sweden, serious film criticism was spearheaded by Bengt Idestam-Almquist, whom the Swedish Film Institute has called the father of Swedish film criticism.[11]

By the 1920s, critics 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.[8] 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.[12]

In the decades of the 1930s and the 1940s, the type of criticism pertaining to films had to overcome some difficult challenges.[13] 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.[13] During the 1930s, the jobs of critics weren't perceived to be great and critics did not earn high wages for their work.[13] 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.[13] In the year of 1948, a critic named Eileen Arnot Robertson was forcibly removed from her job as a critic.[13] 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.[13] 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.[13]

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.[8] 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.[14] 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.[14] 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.[14] 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.[14]

Film critics working for newspapers, magazines, broadcast media, and online publications mainly review new releases, although they also review older films.[15] 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 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). 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.[16]

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.

Research says that there are ways in how film critics are able to write criticisms that involve critical discussions containing rationality.[17] When critics are looking for film criticisms that are factual, they must not behave with excessive optimism or be too demanding.[17] 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.[17] Humans are restrained by the fact that criticisms cannot communicate messages for forms of artwork, and only the artworks can communicate their messages.[17] 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.[17] That requires utilizing criticism that is analytical and thorough with detail.[17] 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.[17] 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.[17] 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.[17] The critics who want to argue must base their arguments in criticisms that have been stated by other critics.[17] 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.[17] 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.[17] 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.[17] 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.[17] Film critics are also responsible for knowing the creators of the films.[17] Thirdly, film critics must blatantly state their own biases and preferences without associating them with any theories.[17] Fourthly, film critics must appreciate the films that are given positive criticisms and film critics must not be ungrateful towards those films.[17] Finally, a film critic must enjoy the movies that they are criticizing.[17] 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.[17]

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.[18] 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.[18] Based in the perspective of an audience member, a review serves as more than an object that is useful for making decisions.[18] 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.[18] 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.[18]

More often known as film theory or film 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.[32]

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.[33]

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.[34]

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.[35]

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.[36] Formalism also involves stages of development occurring in an orderly manner, such as learning easy instructions before learning difficult ones.[36] 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.[36]

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.[37]

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.[38]

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.[39] 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.[39] 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.[39]

Film theory is also part of academic film criticism, since two main film theories have been created.[40] The first main film theory is the part-whole theory.[40] 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.[40] When those segments of films are sequenced in the form of a montage, then the films are artwork.[40] 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.[40]

As of 2021, movie critics earned a yearly average salary of $63,474.[55]

As of 2013, American film critics earned about US$82,000 a year.[56] Newspaper and magazine critics made $27,364-$49,574.[57] Online movie critics earned $2-$200 per review.[57] TV critics made up to $40,000-$60,000 per month.[57]

• Prestige picture
• List of film critics
• List of film journals and magazines
• List of films considered the best
• List of films considered the worst
• For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, a 2009 documentary film