ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book provides some bearings for understanding film criticism by describing it as a "cultural institution" along several axes: the careers and personae of those who make it; the organisations that bestow standing; and the online agora where versions of the film critic now vie for attention. This has shown the means, both formal and informal, by which film criticism makes itself legible to the world, and to itself. However, crisis conversations in film criticism to date have been at least partially enabled by the under-theorisation of film criticism's institutional formations. The potential use of digital tools to do film criticism differently, the encoding and decoding that different publics bring to film criticism, and the role that film criticism plays in a reworked mediascape with a bone-deep predilection for evaluation are all changes that we must reckon with.
