After seeing a movie, I often go to imdb.com’s list of links to movie reviews to see what other people who have thought about the movie have to say about it. There are several U.S. publications that routinely give substantial, thoughtful reviews – among them, the Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert), Washington Post, New York Times, Salon, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, the Village Voice.
However, the main British sites – principly the Times and Guardian – give only brief reviews, almost blurbs. Do British movie critics not have a tradition of substantial, thoughtful reviews? Or perhaps they are not available in the popular press?
Perhaps you’re missing something. The linked Guardian/Observer review of the latest Pirates movie itself contains two links to reviews by Steve Rose and Mark Kermode: you have to click on links labelled “more…”
Take a look at the horse’s mouth, http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/ to see how it compares to what you’ve found on IMDB. Some of the reviews are indeed just short blurbs, but others are much longer, and form significant articles in the printed paper.
I see that Giles’s link does lead to substantial reviews. Funny, usually when I get to that Guardian page the two linked reviews tend to be much shorter.
The arts page that GorillaMan links to seems to be different from the single-movie reviews that imdb.com links to. I wonder if the Guardian publishes two kinds of reviews for two different sections of the paper.
Generally the Guardian’s film reviews are all in a weekly supplement that is included with the Friday paper - see the picture at the top of the page I linked to. I don’t recall them having film reviews in other days of the week (unlike concert & play reviews), although it’s possible that there’s related articles in the Saturday edition. The Observer is the sister paper, which is published on Sundays, and does its own separate reviews.
Could you give us links to some examples on IMDB of what you’re referring to?