Roger Ebert's Movie Reviews
Pulitzer Prize winning Chicago Suntimes critic Roger Ebert is a great admirer of world cinema.
- Raise the Red Lantern ReviewIf the directors and actors of that burst of creativity have never quite equaled it since, perhaps it is because they were originally inspired by the long frustration they experienced before China's arts began to open up. "Raise the Red Lantern" is told so directly and beautifully, with such confidence, with so little evidence of compromise. It is the product of a time when the new Chinese film industry could support such work, but had not yet learned to meddle with it.
- Farewell My Concubine"Farewell My Concubine" is two films at once: An epic spanning a halfcentury of modern Chinese history, and a melodrama about life backstage at the famed Peking Opera. The idea of viewing modern China through the eyes of two of the opera's stars would not, at first, seem logical: How could the birth pangs of a developing nation have much in common with the death pangs of an ancient and ritualistic art form? And yet the film flows with such urgency that all its connections seem logical. And it is
The Criterion Collection: Selected Articles
- Yi Yi: Time and SpaceYi Yi is ultimately a film that imparts its meaning and its impact through its exquisite sense of balance—between here and elsewhere, past and present, the ideal and the conditional, the mundane and the extraordinary. It is a film of, and about, grace. And that is a rare thing.
- Chungking Express: Electric YouthChungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination. What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the generation of Marx and Coca-Cola” in the mid-1960s, Wong Kar-wai did for restless Hong Kong youth during the anxious decade that preceded the handoff to China.
Popular Film Reviews
Some Notes on Searching for Film Reviews:
- When looking for film reviews there may be some difficulty in distinguishing between general film reviews (popular) and scholarly criticsm (Peer-reviewed). General film reviews tend to be more brief and general in their use of language. More scholarly reviews often employ cinematic nomenclature like Mise-en-scène or auteur theory. They also tend to be fairly lengthy.
- Both popular and scholarly reviews employ images with a fair regularity as cinema is a visual medium and pictures illustrate concepts authors are attempting to describe or articulate in their articles. Or more often, they let the reader know exactly what film the author is referring to.
- For film studies research, it's important to read the about section to know what kind of journal or publication format you are dealing with.
- One should not automatically exclude certain authors just because they publish on say, a blog. In the case of a blog, try to note if the author has a large following or publishes in a more widely disseminated medium.
Also See Cinema Studies Databases under the Film Databases Tab.
- Academic Search Elite This link opens in a new windowTo find reviews, type the title of a film then search. On the screen's left menu, choose "review". Don't forget- if we do NOT have full-text access to the review you want, you can request it through InfoLink Inter-library Loan.
- Chicago Tribune, 1849-1998 (Proquest Historical Newspapers) This link opens in a new windowIndex with full-text documents, oftentimes full page viewable. Includes reviews by the late Gene Siskel.
- Film Literature IndexThe Film Literature Index (FLI) annually indexes 150 film and television periodicals from 30 countries cover-to-cover and 200 other periodicals selectively for articles on film and television. The periodicals range from the scholarly to the popular. More than 2,000 subject headings provide detailed analysis of the articles.
- LexisNexis Academic (now called Nexis Uni) This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text access to newspapers and magazines. To find reviews, select the News tab. Then look in the Sources dropdown list and select Book, Movie, Music, Play, and Video Reviews.
- MetacriticProvides access to and summarizes entertainment criticism available online. Combines the individual critic scores into an overall grade for each item.
- Movie Review Query EngineSimple search engine query webpage for finding movie review articles on film titles. Also browseable by pre-compiled lists of titles by category/awards nominations.
- New York Times, 1851-2019 (Proquest Historical Newspapers) This link opens in a new windowFull-text access to the New York Times from 1851 (New York Daily Times) to 2004. Documents display in PDF.
- New York Times Movie ReviewsBrowse or search 28,000 New York Times movie reviews. Included in the free review archive are all films reviewed since 1960, reviews of all Best Picture Academy Award winners, as well as The New York Times guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.
- Periodicals Index Online This link opens in a new windowIndex to magazines in various European languages. To Find film, select "performing arts" as subject.
- CineSceneCineScene is a rather excellent, independent online collection of reviews. Unfortunately, the list of reviews is not very well indexed (searchable), so it helps if you know what you're looking for. See Nobody Knows (2004) or Departures (2009).
Scholarly Film Reviews
- Film CommentFilm Comment is one of the more widely read and disseminate film journals devoted to criticism and analysis. Click on Search on the upper right hand corner to Google search for Japanese related material.
- Film QuarterlyFilm Quarterly is a peer reviewed scholarly American journal published by the University of California Press. Of particular note are their reviews of international (oftentimes obscure) films.
Chinese Film Reviews
Remember: when searching a Chinese Film Site or Database, you can be more specific in your search terms. For example, it's not necessary to search for the term "Chinese film" because it's already assumed that's what you're searching for. Instead, you can search for "fifth generation cinema", a sub-category of "Chinese film".
- Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) This link opens in a new windowThis on-line version of the Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) contains more than 410,000 records on all subjects pertaining to East Asia and China, dating back to 1971.
- China Academic Journals (CAJ): Series A, F, G, & H This link opens in a new windowThis database covers journal articles published in China in almost all the subject areas of the Humanities and Arts, dating back to 1994. Contains some full text in PDF format.