ABSTRACT
This article asks how film criticism is conceptualised and compares scholarly perspectives on criticism more broadly with film criticism in practice. This involves a review of literature covering the functions of criticism and the discovery of important scholarly themes to be tested in interviews, and against a further qualitative methodological backdrop of observations at film festivals and analysis of content carriers. This work starts from a research question that sets out to discover what film criticism actually is. By conducting a literature review that indicates a commonality between film criticism and criticism more broadly via a dialectic of aesthetics and socio-politics, it becomes important to then survey practitioners to ascertain whether or not such theorising on criticism is applicable to their own conceptualisations. With answers showing a difference between the majority of critics sampled and scholarly literature on criticism, and thus a distinction between two groups, it then became pertinent to ask, what other schools or ideas about film criticism might be classifiable? In short, a mixed-method approach using the views of scholars on criticism alongside continued familiarisation with mainly UK and North American content carriers was tested in the field with results that uncovered a disconnect, or in the Hegelian sense a dialectic, that provided grounds for the conceptualisation of Six
Schools of Contemporary Film Criticism: Consumer, Fandom, Populist, Trade, Sophisticated and Academic. An English-language market was chosen because of its size and the regard that some publications there are held in.
