ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the rhetoric of cinephilia, particularly the "new cinephilia" engendered by film criticism's shift online. It seeks to qualify internet boosterist claims that the advent of online film criticism has "democratised" the film-critical function and increased the popularity of previously rarefied film criticism discourses, as well as questioning claims that demotic film criticism is undermining the cultural authority of the professional film critic. The chapter suggests the institutional stratifications that existed prior to the internet have survived the transition to the new medium, and that the new forms of discourse the internet has generated suggest little revolutionary potential. The idea of "cinephilia" as a particular way of consuming, thinking, writing about, and otherwise "being with" cinema pre-dates the internet. The democratic claims of the new cinephilia are reliant on the presumption that the internet is politically transformative in its make-up.
