This is a guide to help you find and research films, media, and pop culture. You can learn more about pop culture analysis, the history of film, film and media criticism, and more.
Image Source: General Research Division, The New York Public Library. "How to make good movies." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1938. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org
What genre does your film or media fall into? What are the implications of this?
When, where, and how was it first created?
What can you learn about the creator(s), director(s), writer(s), or producer(s)?
What can you learn about the principle actresses/actors in the film or show (if applicable)?
How is/was your media critically received at the time it was made?
Is there scholarly criticism?
What is the historical context of your media, and how does that fit into understanding it?
If your media work is an adaptation of a short story or novel, how does it compare to the original? What different choices does the director or creator make? What impact does that have on the meaning?
A few books to help you be the media critic you've always wanted to be!
The Art of Watching Films by 
Extra Lives by
"Millions of adults spend hours every week playing video games, and the industry itself now reliably out earns Hollywood. But the wider culture seems to regard video games as, at best, well designed if mindless entertainment. Extra Lives is an impassioned defense of this assailed and misunderstood art form."
Television and Criticism by
"This volume addresses such topics as the blurring of genres, television and identity, and the sophistication of television audiences by examining examples from soap operas, televised adaptations of classic novels, film noir, and popular shows."
Unit operations: an approach to videogame criticism by
Ian Bogost argues that similar principles underlie both literary theory and computation, proposing a literary-technical theory that can be used to analyze particular videogames.
