Film criticism
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][better source needed] Film is a relatively new form of art, in comparison to music, literature and painting which have existed since ancient times.
The growing popularity of the medium caused major newspapers to start hiring film critics.
Essays analyzing films were written with a distinctive charm and style, and sought to persuade the reader to accept the critic's argument.
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.
[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.
[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?!).
Both critics had established their careers in print media, and continued to write reviews for newspapers during the run of their television show.
[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.
[18] Based in the perspective of an audience member, a review serves as more than an object that is useful for making decisions.
[20] 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 where people can post their own content.
For instance, there are sites that focus on specific content advisories for parents to judge a film's suitability for children.
Some online niche websites provide comprehensive coverage of the independent sector; usually adopting a style closer to print journalism.
[8] The Online Film Critics Society, an international professional association of Internet-based cinema reviewers, consists of writers from all over the world,[23] while New York Film Critics Online members handle reviews in the New York tri-state area.
[25] Critics can write original statements online, but there are websites that will steal their ideas and not give credit to the author.
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.
[30] This ends up making individuals experience increases in their desires to write movie reviews about films that are earning high quantities of money.
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.
After this, there tends to be discussions about the cultural context, major themes and repetitions, and details about the legacy of the film.
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.
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.
[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.
[44] 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 marketing, which undercuts its effectiveness.
[48] Writing for The Atlantic, Kate Kilkenny argued that women were better represented in film criticism before the rise of the Internet.
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.
[47]Matt Reynolds of Wired pointed out that "men tend to look much more favorably on films with more masculine themes, or male leading actors."
[51] Johanson complied statistics for the year 2015 on how having a female protagonist affected a movie, with the following results:[51][52] James Harris, writing for The Critic, argued that "Previously engaging review sites such as Vox, The Guardian and The Onion AV Club have all become The World Social Justice Website, and they are now assessing works in all disciplines in line with wider social justice criteria.
