His career as a film critic, writer, and educator in Australia spanned 57 years, until his retirement in December 2023.

Born in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England, in 1939,[1] David James Stratton[2] was sent to Hampshire to see out the war years with his grandmother.

At the time, he was the subject of surveillance by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), due to the festival showing Soviet films, and his late-1960s visit to Russia.

Stratton has presented a number of film reviews for Palace Nova cinemas, which are posted on their website.

[4][8] Stratton and Pomeranz have played an important role in challenging the often heavy-handed decisions of the Australian Classification Board throughout their career.

[27] In 1993 Stratton made an uncredited cameo appearance in Paul Cox's Touch Me, one of the short films featured in the series Erotic Tales.

[28][29] He has appeared in several ABC programs, including The Chaser's War on Everything, Review with Myles Barlow, Good Game, Adam Hills in Gordon Street Tonight, Lawrence Leung's Choose Your Own Adventure, Dance Academy, and The Bazura Project, often parodying himself.

[4] Stratton participated in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll, where he listed his ten favourite films as follows: Charulata, Citizen Kane, The Conversation, Distant, Distant Voices, Still Lives, Kings of the Road, Lola, The Searchers, Singin' in the Rain, and The Travelling Players.

[40] Two articles which analysed their reviews at SBS and ABC showed that Stratton was generally a slightly harsher critic than Pomeranz.

[41][10] At SBS, they only both gave five stars to four films: Evil Angels (1988), Return Home (1990), The Piano (1993), The Thin Red Line (1999) and Lantana (2001).