I want to read literary and academic movie reviews. I want insights into the film making process. I want inside baseball stuff. I would love to read insightful criticism of the actor’s performances, and I would love for a writer to explore the significance of any motifs. Does anyone *not *write for the average movie goer? So many “top critics” jot off cursory reviews. I want depth.
First one to invoke Ebert loses. His reviews read like whatever he could text off the top of his head during the credits.
You won’t see that in any newspaper or magazine reviews, because that’s not the job of a reviewer. A reviewer watches the film and gives a “consumer report” opinion – what’s good and what’s bad – while avoiding spoilers. His assumption is that you haven’t seen the movie and want to know if it’s worthwhile. Reviewers in the mass media cannot discuss things like significance of motifs because you can’t discuss them unless your audience has already seen the film.
A critic*, OTOH gives a more in-depth discussion, coming from the assumption that you have both seen the movie and want to discuss it more fully.
Ebert** did both. His web page has his reviews, but his essays on the Great Movies are criticism and do cover the topics you are interested in viewing. Most important reviewers also write criticism, but not every day, with perhaps an article every other week on the subject.
There are also film criticism magazines; you’ll usually find them in a university library, usually listed as “film studies.” Here’s a long list of them.**
*Yes, the word is oftent used to mean “reviewer.” “Reviewer,” OTOH, is rarely used to mean “critic,” and most reviewers also write criticism from time to time.
**You can’t lose by mentioning the greatest critic/reviewer of our time.
***But if you don’t like Ebert, you’ll find these extremely pretentious and obscure.
You might like Drew McWeeny’s stuff at Hitfix. He started out at Aint-It-Cool-News, which isn’t a huge plus, but he’s gone on to more mature approaches to his work. He often will go into some depth, with some cinematic history and insight into how the film fits into the zeitgeist.
She passed away some time ago, but Pauline Kael’s reviews (many of which are collected in books) are considered classics.
Kael wrote for The New Yorker. They still do reviews and the OP might want to go to a library and look through some back issues to see if that’s what he’s looking for.
Probably not, though. The problem is that what’s stated in the OP would result in too many spoilers for a review. You need after-the-fact cricitism, and criticism is not reviewing.
Here’s a list of film magazines with online content. (Some no longer available.) Maybe one of them fits the bill.
This isn’t any help if you’re looking for info before you go see a movie, but I have found that (if you just want this kind of information about movies) Joss Whedon provides exactly this information in his voice-over commentary for the movies & tv shows he makes.
Thanks for the answers and ideas, everyone.
I think one issue is you can’t really give a thoughtful in-depth review of a movie that came out this week. You need a little time to digest the movie and think about it. If journalism is the first rough draft of history, then movie reviews are the first rough draft of film criticism.
On that note, you might want to check out the website 10 Year Old Movies. Their plan was to “look at random films on the occasion of their 10th Anniversary, giving them way more consideration than they probably need a decade later”. Unfortunately the site seems to not be updating; their most recent post is a year old (which I guess makes it an eleven year old review).
I just subscribed to: Observations on film art based on this recommendation in the Who Is the Next Ebert? thread. I haven’t yet read much but I enjoyed his entry on The Hobbit.