Entries associated with the tag "Film Criticism":

I'm a frequent contributor to Rouge, so I hope nobody thinks I'm tooting my own horn if I come right out and say that I regard it as the best film magazine going that's exclusively online. It's been around since 2002, and it happens to be based in Australia, but you might not even notice this if you were scanning the table of contents of any issue, because it's far and away the most international of film magazines in English. The latest issue, number ten, has contributors from Australia, Brazil, France, Hungary, Japan, Portugal, Russia, and the U.S., including some filmmakers (Pedro Costa and Mark Rappaport) as well as critics writing about films from most of those countries plus England, India, and Bosnia. About half of the 16 contributors are writing in English, about a third are translated from French, Japanese, or Portuguese, and a couple more express themselves exclusively in the form of a photograph or film frames. In fact, one of the most fascinating of Rouge's former issues, number five (2004), devoted itself exclusively to images selected by 52 contributors.

It's fairly highbrow, and relatively austere in spite of its ingenious uses of images, so I can't pretend that Rouge is geared to every taste. But I do think it's quite attentive to what's going on in movies around the planet. And its purview is certainly wide: in the current issue, you can find material about Sunset Boulevard, Singin' in the Rain, Night of the Demon, and Terrence Malick, as well as Chantal Akerman, Robert Bresson, Pedro Costa, Ritwik Ghatak, English underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead, Ilya Khrzanovsky's recent 4 , and Mikio Naruse's Wife! Be Like a Rose! (the first Japanese sound film to be shown commercially outside Japan; it opened in New York in 1937).

My top-ten (well, OK, 20) list of the year's best movies appears in this week's Reader, along with J.R. Jones's picks and lists from critics in various other fields. Variety has posted a discussion of same between me, Molly Haskell, and Jose Carlos Avellar.

An excellent story in The Reeler, which covers "New York City cinema, from the art house to the red carpet," details how the reorganization of the Village Voice has affected the paper’s film criticism. To quote writer S.T. VanAirsdale, "The interim replacement for fired section editor Dennis Lim . . . lasted only two days before giving his notice, the budget [amounts] to just a third of its size prior to last winter’s merger with the New Times chain, the popular year-end critics’ poll [has] been cancelled, a number of respected freelance critics and feature writers . . . have disappeared from [the Voice's] pages and its de-emphasis on local independent and repertory releases may end up alienating some of its advertisers."

Losing the Voice’s year-end poll was particularly tough for film lovers across the country because it focuses on alternative newspapers, which are more inclined to cover independent and foreign films. By organizing these disparate voices into a single chorus, the Voice poll provided a valuable counterweight to the ten-best lists of the nation’s dailies, which tend to favor big-studio releases. It’s hard to believe that David Cronenberg's harsh A History of Violence would have picked up any Oscar nominations this year if it hadn’t topped the Voice poll in 2005. In addition, the contributors’ comments, collected and edited by Lim, could always be counted on for some of the liveliest and most provocative film writing of the year.

Now word arrives that Lim and critic Anthony Kaufman will be continuing the poll on the Web site IndieWire, with the same rules, categories, and opportunity for critics to sound off. Ballots are due by December 15, and Lim hopes to post the results before the holidays.