History of Movie Criticism and Movie Reviews
Movie criticism has been around since cinema itself and started in the early 1900's. Movie criticism allows views to rate and critique cinema in order to just share their opinion and / or give others insight about the film, whether they should watch it or not, etc. Criticism as a whole was labeled as a "job". If you wanted to get into screenwriting or directing you would often start in criticism in order to gain an understand of what films you'd like to produce and how you'd like to write them.
Criticism in the Paper
In the 1930's film became more of a mainstream form of entertainment causing the media to start doing film reviews more frequently. Journalists who originally wrote for the sports sections or other columns in newspapers started to dedicate a column to writing reviews on films and new releases. Because of this they also started to share their opinions about Hollywood news such as movie star gossip. There would usually be one reviewer per local newspaper, the reviewers would write about it in the paper and everyone would read it. Naturally this lead writers to influence people in that area heavily; for example if the reviewer didn't like a film, a lot of people in that area wouldn't go and see it which meant you couldn't really get a second opinion.
Star ratings for films were then formed due to movie reviewers. Like today a lot of people don't want to read a full movie or book review, so they will just look at the star ratings and decide if the content is worth their time to see or read. Star ratings come in a group of five stars, meaning films labeled with four to five stars were defiantly worth seeing, films with three stars might be worth seeing, and films with one to two stars were a waste of time.
TV Changes Film Criticism
When television become a widely owned thing, film criticism was taken to the TV as well. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert's popular show titles At the Movies brought criticism to people all around the country. This caused people to finally have the second opinion. Due to everyone in the nation getting this show on their TV, local film critics weren't the only opinions that mattered anymore. Siskel and Ebert proposed questions such as, "were the movies enjoyable?', 'were they worth watching?', etc. Roger Ebert went on to be the biggest name in movie criticism until his death.
The Internet
Because we now have the beautiful technology that is the internet, movie criticism has changed yet again. There are now blog and review sites such as Rotten Tomatoes solely dedicated to film criticism. People are allowed to go onto this site and write their own opinion on any movie they want, they are also allowed to rate it on a scale of tomatoes. The scaling system Rotten Tomatoes uses isn't all that different from five star ratings, but it is definitely interesting. Viewers are allowed to use the 'Tomatometer' to display positive or negative percentages depending on how they feel about the film. A 'Fresh' scale is scores of 60% or higher meaning that the film is good and definitely worth watching. The 'Rotten' scale is scores of a 60% or lower telling you that the movie is not good and not worth it. Rotten Tomatoes and blog cites alike have expanded the opinion of one person to people all around the world.
From starting at a singular local reviewer influencing the people in their town, to people all over the world sharing their opinions and influencing each other; film criticism has come such a long way, but sometimes all the opinions can get a little too much. If so many people are voting their opinions, how do you know who to listen to? I say, watch the movie and form your own opinion.
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