INQ-277 | Writing Film Reviews and Film Criticism

Topic Description:

This course is designed to help students discern different kinds of film reviews, their different audiences and purposes, and, within the different kinds, we’ll try to see what makes an accomplished and interesting review stand out among lesser reviews. We’ll also read essays in film criticism and look into the different audiences and purposes of reviews and film criticism. Students will screen new films, review them, read current reviews of them, and discuss together the films and reviews. Students will also screen films that have been deemed important to film history or cultural history, read criticism of these films, and attempt an essay in film criticism. This is as much a writing course as a film course, attending to the different rhetorical situations of the two forms of film writing. This is a campus course, with a lot of afternoon movie-going in the area, on-campus film screenings, a lot of reading of current film reviews in the local paper, national dailies, weekly magazines (for example, The New Yorker, The Nation), film magazines (for example, Premiere), online sites (for example, Slate, Rotten Tomatoes), classic review-essays by the likes of Pauline Kael, and film criticism in the more scholarly film journals (for example, Screen).

Course Types Offered: On-Campus

Topic Approved: November 2006