Film critics can be powerful figures within the cinema industry. In the United States, for instance, as members of bodies such as the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics' Association, they have voting rights for annual awards ceremonies; winning such awards can greatly enhance the marketability of a successful film. Critics also exert power by publishing reviews in newspapers, news weeklies, and popular magazines and by appearing on television programs. Many of these critics have become celebrated and respected, some notorious, with their opinions at times believed to be a prominent factor in a movie's popular reception. The influential and impassioned critic Pauline Kael, who wrote for the weekly magazine The New Yorker from 1967 to 1991, was noted for her independent—often idiosyncratic—opinions. For instance, she was highly critical of West Side Story (1961), winner of multiple Oscars ® ; yet she championed the widely attacked Last Tango in Paris (1972). Andrew Sarris and later J. Hoberman reviewed films for New York's weekly newspaper The Village Voice . Sarris was initially a writer for the more academic journal Film Culture (1958–1992), which was the primary publication for the American film avant-garde. It was in that journal in 1962 that Sarris first employed the term "auteur theory," initially put forth in 1954 by François Truffaut in the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma (begun in 1951). After The Village Voice , Sarris served as a critic for the newspaper The New York Observer .
Other notable American critics include Jonathan Rosenbaum, film reviewer for the alternative weekly Chicago Reader , and Roger Ebert, whose reviews have appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967 and in wide syndication. In the United Kingdom, Alexander Walker served as film critic for London's Evening Standard from 1960 until his death in 2003. Like Kael, Sarris, and Rosenbaum, Walker was a respected writer of film books, including a study of the director Stanley Kubrick and a trilogy of books on British cinema. A prolific writer, Walker was not afraid to give a controversial opinon, and as such he was associated with notorious reactions to films such as The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971), Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996), and Ôdishon ( Audition , Takeshi Miiki, 1999). Christopher Tookey of the Daily Mail is also known for condemning certain films deemed confrontational. Many saw Walker, along with reviewers such as Derek Malcolm, who was film critic for The Guardian from 1970 until his retirement in 2000, as among the last of a band of journalists to have a genuine knowledge of cinema history. In the United Kingdom and the United States contemporary film reviews often seem designed to provide attention-grabbing quotes for movie advertising. Also, the Internet is growing into an immensely powerful tool in a film's success; the critic Harry Knowles of the Website www.aintitcoolnews.com has attained the status of a minor celebrity for his unorthodox postings.
Pauline Kael was an outspoken, witty, and often unpredictable film critic who wrote for the weekly magazine The New Yorker from 1967 to 1991. Regarded as arguably America's greatest film critic, she influenced many, with her group of devotees called the "Paulettes." Her books include I Lost It at the Movies (1965), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968), The Citizen Kane Book (1971), Deeper into Movies (winner of a National Book Award, 1973), and 5001 Nights at the Movies (1982).
After studying philosophy, literature, and the arts at the University of California at Berkeley, she ran an art-house cinema in San Francisco in the late 1950s while broadcasting film reviews for a Berkeley radio station. She wrote film reviews for Vogue , Life , and The New Republic and the film journals Sight and Sound and Film Quarterly . Although her work, both for film journals and general-interest publications, exhibited an intellectualism, her writing style was notable in that she incorporated her personal experiences as well as slang and put-downs. She was avowedly anti-theory, assailing supporters of the auteur theory for what she saw as their attempt to advance Hollywood directors to the status of artists. She entered into a notorious public debate with Andrew Sarris about the auteur theory, ridiculing Sarris's proposed auteur "theory" with a persuasive deflation of auteurism's critical assumptions, and later on published The Citizen Kane Book (1971), in which she offered an account of the production of Orson Welles's film that attempted to show that it was less the product of a single towering auteur than a collaboration among several important artists.
An advocate of good storytelling and powerful acting, she was critical of the conceptual work of European filmmakers such as Alain Resnais, Robert Bresson, and Ingmar Bergman. Drawn to popular culture and films with energy that engaged the viewer's emotions, she blamed television for superficiality in movies after the 1950s and particularly disliked Hollywood's move toward event movies or big action films. She praised the Hollywood genre productions of the 1930s and 1940s and the realism and humanism of the European directors Max OphĂĽls, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio de Sica. These values coalesced in a group of films that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s by maverick directors whom Kael championed, such as Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, and Sam Peckinpah, and the early films of the Hollywood new wave of Francis Ford Coppola, Brian de Palma, and Steven Spielberg. Kael had a sociological approach to movies that took into account the reactions of the general filmgoer. Considering the cinema as essentially an entertainment experience, some would argue that she was less a critic than a reviewer.
Davis, Francis. Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael . Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002.
Hampton, Howard. "Pauline Kael, 1919–2001. Such Sweet Thunder." Film Comment 37, no. 6 (November–December 2001): 45–48.
Kael, Pauline. The Citizen Kane Book . New York: Limelight Editions, 1984. Originally published in 1971.
——. 5001 Nights at the Movies: A Guide from A to Z . New York: Henry Holt, 1991. Originally published in 1982.
——. I Lost It at the Movies . New York: M. Boyars, 1994. Originally published in 1965.
Ian Conrich
Trade journals, the earliest of film publications, are not generally recognized for their film reviews but rather are designed to support the industry through business news and advice on equipment and technical issues. Among the first were the American titles Moving Picture World (1907–1927) and Motion Picture News (1911–1930) and the British title Bioscope (1908–1932). In comparison to other film publications, trade journals have been marked by their longevity, in particular Motion Picture Herald (1915–1972); American Cinematographer (begun in 1921); Hollywood Reporter (begun in 1934), the film industry's first daily trade paper; and, most noticeably, Variety (begun in 1905). The latter has become an industry institution: its film reviews are influential, and its style of journalism, consisting of a jargon composed of abbreviations, alliteration, or a rhyming structure, has regularly been adopted as media-speak. Variety has even provided a "slanguage"
dictionary on its website. In the United Kingdom, Screen International (begun in 1975) is the key surviving trade publication. Its history can be traced back to The Daily Film Renter (1927–1957), which merged with Today's Cinema: News and Property Gazette (1928–1957) and became The Daily Cinema (1957–1968); Today's Cinema (1969–1971); and Cinema TV Today (1971–1975). The other major UK trade journal, Kine Weekly , which began in 1904 as Optical Lantern and Kinematograph Journal and went through several name changes, ceased publication in 1971.
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