What is Film Criticism?

Criticism is analysis, interpretation and evaluation of artists and their creative work.

Criticism is not necessarily negative. Criticism means a thoughtful critique of an artist's work or style in order to better understand the meaning, symbolism or influences of a particular piece or a body of work. 

Criticism exists in all art disciplines, including drama, film, music, visual arts, and literature.

Criticism is written for different audiences and purposes. Strategize how to find the right kind of criticism for your research needs.

Reviews & News, such as film, book or art exhibit reviews, are written for the general public and published in newspapers and magazines, for radio and television, and on the Web. This "popular" criticism may be brief and fairly superficial in nature or it may engage thoughtfully and extensively with a text. Look for more thoughtful and in depth popular criticism. 

Criticism written for a student audience may serve multiple purposes: it may provide an overview of a work's plot, themes, style, and narrative structure; give an overview of critical interpretations of the work; or situate the work within a genre or theoretical movement. It works at an introductory level and does not assume prior knowledge of the text or issues. 

Scholarly criticism written for an academic audience engages in more in-depth, analytical, and sustained discussion of a text. Scholarly criticism is argumentative. A critic makes a claim and supports that claim with evidence from the text (film, book, art, etc.). Scholarly criticism may also step into an ongoing "conversation" with other critics by referring to, building on, or refuting other readings of a text. Scholarly criticism is found in scholarly journals and books.

Excerpt from a scholarly article:  

The superhero films have gained popularity in recent years. Their stories have proven to be profitable for Hollywood studios, as well as alluring for global viewers. The Marvel franchise has been the leader of this production increment. Initially, the media company sold the rights of certain characters to major studios; the studios, meanwhile, developed their own versions. Nevertheless, Marvel executives, led by producer Kevin Feige, decided that it was better, creatively and economically, to start producing the films by themselves, independently, sometimes with an occasional partnership (Leonard, 2014). This decision created the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which consists of separate stories of different superheroes that are linked to a common narrative (Murray, Phipps, & Singer, 2013), having the opportunity to unite all the characters in feature films such as The Avengers series or Captain America: Civil War (2016). Following the box office successes of its competitor, D.C. Comics has also started to plan a similar shared universe in cinematic form. Thus, the phenomenon suggests a trend of a new superhero film, in which a base narrative nurtures different plots with tight relations between each one.

Discursively, the superhero genre has been criticized for containing ideological representations that support a certain status quo (Arnaudo, 2013; Collins, 2015; Eco, 1964/2011, Klock, 2002; McAllister, Sewell & Gordon, 2001; Moore, 2003; Hugues, 2006). Nonetheless, Marvel comics have historically integrated references to social reality, creating more intertextual conflicts (Johnson, 2012; Rauscher, 2010). This tendency has appeared in the cinematic counterpart: The characters have become more self-conscious of their roles, even questioning the ‘greater good’ that they are trying to achieve. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has started following a more traditional logic, but the recent stories have focused on moral issues, criticizing, for instance, military solutions typical of American foreign policy. Hence, this article studies the political representations of two recent Marvel films to understand the ideological operations of their cinematic discourse. Two films were selected to understand the relationship between political ideologies and contemporary iterations of the superhero genre: Iron Man (2008) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014). The study is based on a Critical Discourse Analysis approach and utilizes two analytical categories: plot and characters – the second is divided in two subcategories: biographic origins and objectives. 

Full article:

Critical Literary Theory Questions:

Marxist Reading Questions:

• Does the text critique oppressive socioeconomic forces (including repressive ideologies)?
• What does the story reveal about the history of the class struggle? Historical context?
• How does the text critique religion as a repressive ideological force that keeps people from realizing their socioeconomic situation?
• Does the content examine, reinforce, or critique a repressive ideology? What about the form?

Feminist Reading Questions:

• How is the work “gendered”? Does the text accept, question, or reject traditional gender roles? In what ways?
• How does the author examine traditional gender roles in the story (does it have a patriarchal or feminist agenda or is it ideologically conflicted)?
• How is sex (intercourse) represented in the text? Is the sex consensual? Is it coercive (rape)?

Psychoanalytic Reading Questions:

• How does the unconscious assert itself in characters throughout the story? How do repressed fears shape the character’s behavior?
• How do the patterns of behavior in the main character and his or her family dynamics (think of repressed wounds, fears, sexual desires, conflict, etc.) operate in the story?
• Is the text analogous in any way (literally or symbolically) to a dream? Are there dream symbols at work in the text. What larger issues or problems or truths might they represent?

Other theoretical approaches

• You are not limited to the theoretical approaches outlined above. Colonial and post-colonial theory, critical race theory, psychoanalytic theory, and other theoretical approaches are all employed in the examination of films as texts.