Film Criticism
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There’s a Critic On Set!
In the nearly ten years I have worked as a film critic and journalist, the sources and stability of my income have severely varied. Freelance movie reviewing for multimedia outlets, like The Rotten Tomatoes Show on the now-defunct Current TV, or Medium Rare TV in San Francisco, kept me afloat through film school. Then in Sydney, Australia, internships in advertising and radio paid well enough for me to start and support a boutique film blog, CineMalin: Film Commentary and Criticism. But in Austin, Texas, where I moved for graduate school some years ago, employment options for professional film writers are […]
by Sean Malin on Oct 20, 2016 -
“Thumbs Down” Study Shows Gender Imbalance Among Critics
There has been no shortage of studies about the gender imbalance of women in the film industry, particularly behind the camera. Now a new study suggests that women are outnumbered when it comes to writing and broadcasting about films as well. “Thumbs Down 2016: Top Film Critics and Gender,” a new study from the San Diego-based Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film (CSWTF) examined 5,776 reviews by 247 “top critics” appearing on the Rotten Tomatoes website during spring 2016. The most comprehensive study of women’s representation as film writers, “Thumbs Down” concluded that men outnumber women by 73% to […]
by Paula Bernstein on Jun 24, 2016 -
“This Is The Guy”: Steve James, Roger Ebert and Life Itself
“Who the fuck are you?” Fueled on booze, Flamo was raging. Someone had told the cops he had stashed guns in his house, and so his mum and brother were handcuffed and led away. Craving revenge but thinking better, Flamo phoned Cobe (pronounced KOH-bay), someone he met years earlier in the county jail who was now a violence interruptor, counseling young gangbangers like Flamo to chill out and stop drawing blood in Chicago’s crime-ravaged South Side. When Cobe arrived, Flamo was stunned to find some white man filming him. Luckily, Cobe knew how to vouch for the white man to the youth he […]
by Allan Tong on Mar 26, 2014 -
I Went to the Movies in 2013. Thoughts Followed.
In 2013 I began watching over 500 movies and finished about half that number. (Film Critic Tip #1: don’t finish movies you plan not to write about that aren’t any good unless they are sublimely bad). Perhaps I’ve grown surly in my fourth decade or perhaps I always was. I just feel like I don’t have the time anymore. Sometimes I went weeks without watching a film, an unimaginable possibility in my recent past. Was this all driven by a sense that my life (and perhaps yours) will be shorter than we think, that the safeguards we’re building against the […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 27, 2013 -
Rodney Ascher on Room 237 and the Haunting of The Shining
A must-see for not just fans of The Shining but anyone who has been obsessed by a movie, Rodney Ascher’s Room 237, opening today, is a documentary about a group of online fans, scholars and theorists who have dedicated their lives — or at least their leisure hours — to unpacking bizarre, alternative interpretations about Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic. Above, recorded last year at the Cannes Film Festival, I discuss with Ascher the origins of his film, why you never see the faces of his interview subjects, and Fair Use. Ascher is interviewed in the latest issue of Filmmaker by […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 29, 2013 -
Swanberg Clobbers Faraci
Filmmaker Joe Swanberg clobbered Badass Digest critic Devin Faraci — in the ring, that is. I’ll leave it up to you to decide who scored more rhetorical points in their on-stage debate at Fantastic Fest. But after the verbal duel, the two climbed in the ring — literally — for a boxing match of which Swanberg emerged the victor. Indeed, Faraci’s haymakers were no match for Swanberg’s driving jabs. Matt Singer at Indiewire has the full transcript of the talk. An excerpt is below, as is a video of the fight. Devin Faraci: Joe, I want to thank you for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 23, 2012 -
“Blue Velvet Project” Creator Nicholas Rombes
One year ago, Nicholas Rombes proposed “The Blue Velvet Project” to me at Filmmaker. For 12 months, three times a week, he would scrutinize a single frame from David Lynch’s modern classic, looking both inside and outside of its aspect ratio for correspondences, allusions and meanings. For Rombes, it would be another in his “time-based” critical film essays — appropriately so, for it was because of another of these columns, 10/40/70 at The Rumpus, that I discovered his writing in the first place. (In fact, I interviewed him previously about this other fascinating project.) Nick had contributed to Filmmaker before […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 17, 2012 -
“ZONA” AUTHOR GEOFF DYER HOSTS WEEKEND OF NYC TARKOVSKY EVENTS
I’m halfway through Zona, Geoff Dyer’s book-length consideration of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker but wanted to post now to alert Dyer/Tarkovsky fans to a weekend of great events. In Zona, Dyer critiques Stalker in what feels like real-time, explicating each scene and then allowing his mind to free associate and wander, filling up the book’s many footnotes with fascinatingly digressive asides. I’ll have some thoughts on the book in the next print edition, but take note now of this weekend of appearances in support of the book. If I wasn’t in Austin I’d be at some of these. Friday, March 9—NYC […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 9, 2012 -
IN DEFENSE OF ELITISM
Not to pick on Anne Thompson again, a fine industry journalist certainly, but a blog entry she published this past Friday piqued my interest for all the wrong reasons. (See the post, the healthy comments thread, and also David Poland’s response.) Thompson took a critical stance on a new feature of the New York Times’ Carpetbagger section, where lead critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott will provide an in-depth answer to one reader’s question every month. Allowing the critics to choose a question to answer, and giving them some time to work on their response, as opposed (one presumes) to […]
by Zachary Wigon on Feb 21, 2011 -
A Movie is Like a Person: Enter the Void
“Then, too, there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of, for those who want to analyze,” Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal essay Against Interpretation. “For the cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of forms — the explicit, complex, and discussable technology of camera movements, cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into the making of a film.” Toward the very end of the same essay, she advocated, “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to […]
by Zachary Wigon on Oct 15, 2010
