Free Republic

Richard Schickel, the longtime film critic for Time magazine who also wrote 37 books, mostly on film, and directed a number of documentaries on film subjects, died on Saturday in Los Angeles of complications from a series of strokes, his family told the Los Angeles Times. He was 84. “He was one of the fathers of American film criticism,” his daughter, writer Erika Schickel, told the Times. “He had a singular voice. When he wrote or spoke, he had an old-fashioned way of turning a phrase. He was blunt and succinct both on the page and in life.” He wrote...

A simple biography of the film critic Roger Ebert would have made for a full documentary, but the director Steve James set the bar much higher with “Life Itself.” The film, receiving its television premiere Sunday night on CNN, covers the life and career of Mr. Ebert, who died in 2013 ...

Roger Ebert, the longtime film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, passed away Thursday, the newspaper reported. His passing comes just one day after publishing a note on his website that he would be scaling back work as he continued his battle with cancer. He was 70 years old. Ebert was hospitalized last fall with a broken hip, of which his wife tweeted was caused by "tricky disco dance moves." Last May he unveiled plans to reinvent "Roger Ebert Presents at The Movies" on PBS, and Tuesday he said he will launch a fundraising campaign via Kickstarter in the next couple...

When you love a given film and the guy next to you doesn’t, what do you think? Who cares, right? After all, taste is subjective. Newsreal Blog managing editor David Swindle and I often discuss and debate films we’ve seen. Now, I’ve studied film formally for years. Does this make my opinion more important? Perhaps for some academics, but does this make Swindle’s opinion useless? Most certainly not. My view of film is often based in academia and film history while Swindle’s is based in the comparison to other contemporary films. Both views are justified and have their place. We...

News To Her by: Malcolm A. Kline, December 06, 2007 Reality is for people who can’t face academia. As reported by Matt Eagan in The Hartford Courant, one academic, in commenting on the vanishing breed of scribes known as newspaper film critics, showed that she herself has a hard time distinguishing between breaking stories and popular features. “It’s just part of the disappearance of news from daily newspapers,” Jeanine Bassinger of Wesleyan University says. “As newspapers are cutting back, there is a feeling that readers will get their reviews from somewhere else.” “Those of us who were used to reading...

In 18 years as a professional movie critic, I've never gotten the response that I had this week to my one-star review of "The Passion of the Christ." I knew the reaction would be hostile - movie critics routinely get hate mail, even one time for a review of "Bambi." But, as they would say in an action movie of the kind Mel Gibson formerly made, this time, it's personal.

<p>Meet David Denby, an American sucker indeed.</p> <p>Thursday, January 8, 2004 12:01 a.m.</p> <p>Even now, reading about the Internet stock-mania remains painful. So many people got torched, and many of them are still red-faced about the mistakes they made. The lingering shame may explain why the era has yet to deliver its "Den of Thieves" or "Liar's Poker," the defining books about Wall Street in the 1980s. In that earlier period of excess, most folks observed the Ivan Boeskys from afar. This time just about everyone found himself at least ankle-deep in the muck. And nobody really wants to read about his own foolishness. Or write about it.</p>