Research Guides: Film and Video Guide: Film Research and Criticism

Scholarly Film Criticism and Reviews

Additional scholarly film criticism can be found in databases that cover such topics as history, communications, women's studies, and others.

FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals Plus This link opens in a new window
Offers coverage of academic and popular film journals. Each entry consists of a full bibliographic description, an abstract and comprehensive headings (biographical names, film titles and general subjects).
Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Indexing and abstracts for more than 270 publications (and selected coverage of more than 300), as well as full text for more than 70 journals.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. It has an archive of more than 1,000 scholarly, interdisciplinary journals, with full coverage for all but the most current 3-5 years. The entire archive is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
Literature, language, linguistics, folklore references from the Modern Language Association. Includes references to journal articles, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. Although full text is not included in the MLA Bibliography, the Find it @ WVU service provides links to full text from other databases when available.
Project Muse This link opens in a new window
Project MUSE provides searchable, full text access to hundreds of academic journals and books. It covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, and many others.

Newspaper Film Reviews

Newspaper Reviews are provided by resident film critics who write for general audiences. Most papers offer reviews of current films. Usually documentaries or foreign films are only reviewed in the larger city papers. They are available on the following library databases:

Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an intuitive interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
Newspaper Source Plus This link opens in a new window
Newspaper Source Plus provides a full-text digital collection of the world's major news content. It includes millions of articles from newspapers, newswires and news magazines. In addition, it offers television and radio transcripts and ongoing daily updates from popular news sources.

Popular Web Film Review Sites

Film Reviews are normally written around the time that films are released. These provide information about the film, critical comparisons, audience suitability, and general rating. Reviews can be found in both newspapers, and popular magazines. Websites like Movie Review Query Engine, Internet Movie Database, Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert Film Reviews and Amazon also provide film reviews

Movie Review Query Engine (gives newspaper, blog and Internet reviews of movies)
Internet Movie Database (provides "external reviews" from many sources, as well as "user comments")
Rotten Tomatoes (combines magazine, newspaper, Internet reviews and film evaluations)
Roger Ebert Film Reviews (is a well known film critic for the Chicago Sun Times)
Amazon Film Reveiws (find user comments and ratings for popular films)