Film Discourse on the Praised and Acclaimed: Reviewing Criteria in the United States and United Kingdom

This research examines the aesthetic elements of contemporary film criticism. Although a restricted field of film production has arisen beside the large-scale field, including an elite critical discourse, the film industry remains relentlessly oriented to its goal of producing commercial products that achieve widespread popular appeal. This differentiation becomes apparent in the types of films validated by publics, peers, and critics. Our exploratory analysis examines whether the dichotomy of artistic versus popular forms of criticism still captures the complexity of films produced under conditions of increased commercialization, globalization, and digitization. We analyzed reviews published in newspapers of record in the United Kingdom and United States of films released in 2007 that received the utmost popular, professional, and critical recognition. Findings reveal that contemporary film criticism incorporates aesthetic elements drawn from popular interests as well as elite art considerations, thereby complicating crit

Dimensions of Conventionality and Innovation in Film: The Cultural Classification of Blockbusters, Award Winners, and Critics' Favourites

Today's complex film world seems to upset the dual structure corresponding with Bourdieu's categorization of 'restricted' and 'large-scale' fields of cultural production. This article examines how movies in French, Dutch, American and British film fields are classified in terms of material practices and symbolic affordances. It explores how popular, professional, and critical recognition are related to film production as well as interpretation. Analysis of the most successful film titles of 2007 offers insight into the film field's differentiation. Distinction between mainstream and artistic film shows a gradual rather than a dichotomous positioning that spans between conventionality and innovation. Apparently, the intertwining of small-scale and large-scale film fields cannot be perceived as a straightforward loss of distinction or an overall shift of production logics, but rather as 'production on the boundaries' in which filmmakers combine production logics to cater to publics with various levels of aesthetic fluency and omnivorous taste patterns

Trends in Cultural Journalism

Various studies report that cultural journalism increasingly focuses on service and entertainment instead of serious arts coverage. The press prioritizes popular culture over traditional high arts to growing extent. However, this shift in journalistic attention doesn’t necessarily signify a straightforward decline in aesthetic standards, as popular cultural forms like film have developed along the lines of high art principles in the past decades. This article charts trends in American, Dutch, French, and German film journalism between 1955 and 2005. It demonstrates that coverage is typified by a serious aesthetic approach from the 1970s onwards. The principles of art are seen to steer journalists’ attention to an important degree: the review remains the predominant journalistic genre, and newspapers devote more attention to films by prestigious directors than strictly commercial moviemakers. As such, film’s prominence in the press doesn’t seem to indicate a decline in serious cultural journalism but rather a revaluation of a popular cultural form

Terms of Enjoyment: Film Classification and Critics’ Discourse in Comparative Perspective

Film as a cultural genre commands great popularity and exercises influence over today’s Western culture in no small way (Bordwell & Thompson, 1997; McDonald & Wasko, 2008). As such, film is also a sizeable global industry that annually churns out hundreds of new movies in many different countries. The enormous supply contains commercial movies for large mainstream audiences and art films for the specialized few (Tudor, 2007) in an array of genres, subgenres, and styles (Cook, 2007). Film audiences may emerge from preferences for particular directors, actors, screenwriters, composers, genres, styles, series, formulas, or themes. Further, audiences differ with regard to expertise and seek different viewing experiences; movies may meet the need for escapism or provide intellectual challenges (Silvia & Berg, 2011). For example, fans of the romantic comedy genre aim for submersion in an emotionally resonating story, while admirers of director David Lynch’s surrealism look for analysis and interpretation. In other words, they employ different terms of enjoyment

Understanding The Hobbit: the cross-national and cross-linguistic reception of a global media product in Belgium, France and the Netherlands

The Hobbit franchise, as many global media products, reaches audiences worldwide. Audience members apparently consume a uniform media product. But do they? The World Hobbit Project offers a new and exciting opportunity to explore differences and similarities, for it provides us with audiences' understandings of the trilogy across languages and nationalities. In this paper we conduct a statistical analysis on differences and similarities in understandings of The Hobbit trilogy between Belgium, the Netherlands, and France – both in what audiences do and do not feel The Hobbit films to be. Analyzing this particular region in Europe provides an extraordinary opportunity, for The World Hobbit project allows us to compare on the language level (the Dutch and French-speaking Belgian regions with respectively the Netherlands and France), as well as on the level of national identities (comparing the three countries amongst each other). In doing so, we are able to further understand what informs geographical and linguistic differences in the consumption of a uniform media product. As such, this paper touches upon cultural hegemony, cross-border flows of fiction, language and cultural proximity

National Cultural Repertoires of Evaluation in a Global Age: Film Discourse in France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States

Abstract The expanded international exchange of culture products caused Western cultural fields to resemble each other. Hollywood movies prevail on import markets around the world, inducing homogenized film fields dominated by blockbusters. However, although global audiences to a large degree consume the same movies, they do not necessarily make sense of them in the same manner. Cultural surroundings may still differentiate the socially constructed national cultural repertoires of evaluation. This article examines the sustenance of such repertoires through the analysis of film criticism in France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and United States. Combined qualitative and quantitative methods demonstrate that while critics in all countries use the same discourse components, evaluative repertoires vary in composition and style. Western countries command distinguishing features that particularize their manners of meaning making despite the ubiquity of globalizing trends