MRU Library Website: Film Studies: Film Reviews

Film Review Resources

The following sources focus primarily on popular reviews written by journalists and film critics for magazines, newspapers, and websites. If you are seeking scholarly film analyses and commentaries, such as those published in academic journals, use the tools listed on the Articles tab of this guide.

Academic Search Complete
Journal and magazine articles across a broad range of subject areas.
EBSCO permalink help link

Access to this resource is funded by Alberta Advanced Education through the Lois Hole Campus Alberta Digital Library.
MasterFILE Premier
Provides full text for nearly multidisciplinary, general reference publications. Includes full text reference books, biographies, primary source documents, book and film reviews, and an image collection of photos, maps and flags.
Communication & Mass Media Complete
Index & abstracts, and selected coverage, for journals in areas related to communication and mass media.
Canadian Newsstream
Access to the full text of Canadian newspapers, newswires, newsmagazines, and television and radio transcripts.
Canadian Business & Current Affairs Complete
Full text for Canadian publications on a broad range of subject areas including CBCA Business, CBCA Education, and CBCA Reference & Current Events.
Access to this resource is funded by Alberta Advanced Education through the Lois Hole Campus Alberta Digital Library.
New York Times Digital
Access to New York Times content via website or app.
What is included? News: Reporting, analysis, and cultural coverage. Cooking, Wirecutter (product reviews), Audio (shows, narrated articles and more). Limited access to Games and the Athletic. 10 articles/month to share with non-subscribers.

Access NYT (if you have an account).
NYT educational account activation (valid for 365 days)
How is access managed? First time users must activate their educational account which can be used for direct access to NYT via the website or app. Accounts must be renewed each year via the NYT educational access account activation link.
What is included in the subscription? News: Access to reporting, analysis, and cultural coverage. Cooking, Wirecutter (product reviews), Audio (shows, narrated articles and more). 10 digital gift articles to share with non-subscribers each month. Limited access to Games and the Athletic.
What is not included? Unlimited access to Games or the Athletic.

CineFiles
Curated by the University of California Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. Contains scanned images of reviews, press kits, film festival and repertory theater program notes, newspaper articles, and other ephemera from our extensive collections.

Notable Film Magazines

For high quality reviews written by professional film critics, watch for the following publications. You can also search directly within the magazines below.

Cinema Scope
Published in Canada, and with a focus on world cinema.
Cinéaste
Reviews of and essays about international films.
Film Comment
Reveews and analysis of mainstream and experimental film from all over the world.
Sight & Sound
An official publication of the British Film Institute, publishes interviews, commentary, criticism, and more on films and film culture.

Aggregators and crowdsourced reviews

IMDB - Internet Movie Database
Along with plot summaries, casts and production credits, IMDB includes a large assortment of fan-based and journalistic reviews. Focus on the journalistic reviews from published sources you recognize.
Metacritic
Aggregates and combines many critics' voices into the single Metascore, a weighted average of the most respected critics writing reviews online and in print.
Movie Review Query Engine (MRQE)
Good source of popular film reviews; similar to IMDB.
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes calls itself "the leading online aggregator of movie and TV show reviews."

Books on Film Criticism

Film Criticism in the Digital Age by Mattias Frey (Editor); Cecilia Sayad (Editor)
ISBN: 0813570743
Publication Date: 2015-04-20
Over the past decade, as digital media has expanded and print outlets have declined, pundits have bemoaned a "crisis of criticism" and mourned the "death of the critic." Now that well-paying jobs in film criticism have largely evaporated, while blogs, message boards, and social media have given new meaning to the saying that "everyone's a critic," urgent questions have emerged about the status and purpose of film criticism in the twenty-first century.
The Complete History of American Film Criticism by Jerry Roberts
ISBN: 9781595800497
Publication Date: 2010-02-19
A chronicle of the lives and work of the most influential film critics of the past 100 years. From the first movie review in the New York Times in 1896 through the Silent Era, the pre- and postwar years, the Film Generation of the 1960s, the Golden Age of the 1970s, and into the 21st century.
The Review As Art and Communication by Joey Skidmore
ISBN: 9781443844444
Publication Date: 2013-03-01
Not only presents the idea that book reviews, record reviews, theatrical reviews and reviews of any genre can be substantive essays on their own - expounding and elaborating on the concepts and ideas of the original material critiqued - but it also explores the shelf-life of the review: the odd phenomenon that just like other forms of art, some stand the test-of-time, and some do not.
Making a Meal of It by Brian McFarlane
ISBN: 9781925523416
Publication Date: 2018-03-26
For more than forty years, readers of Melbourne newspapers and journals - and radio listeners - have learned about the latest films through the interpretations and judgments of Brian McFarlane. Over that time McFarlane's reviews of and articles on film have featured in The Age, Australian Book Review, Cinema Papers, Inside Story, Meanjin, Metro, Screening the Past, Senses of Cinema, Sight & Sound, and many other sources online, on air and on paper.

Film Studies | Film Reviews

Film Review Resources

Notable Film Magazines

Aggregators and crowdsourced reviews

Books on Film Criticism