This section provides tips on finding reviews of films written by film critics.
Movie reviews range from brief summaries of the film, sometimes with an indicator of quality like stars or thumbs up/down, to critical analyses with cultural insight. The synopses help audiences decide if they want to see a film and can offer insight into how a film was received when it was released. The critical analyses help you understand the impact of the film on culture (or vice versa.)
Reviews of films released prior to the 1990s are most likely to appear in newspapers and magazines within a few weeks (either prior to or after) the film was released.
Reviews of films released starting in the 1990s and later may appear in newspapers and magazines, and are also published in blogs, online magazines, on social media, such as YouTube, and other websites.
Because film reviews can be created by anyone, look for clues indicating that the reviewer is critically engaging with the film.
At the most basic level, in a good review:
More critical reviews may feature:
Find reviews of films published in newspapers and magazines through these databases at K-State. These databases include current and historical publications, pay attention to the dates covered by the databases in comparison to the date the film you are interested in was released or re-released.
Publication Dates Covered: 1851-2020 Paid for by K-State Libraries
Digitized version of The New York Times since its first issue in 1851. Search the full text of articles to find articles on a wide variety of topics. Full name of the database is ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index.
Publication Dates Covered: 1980 - present Paid for by K-State Libraries
Search the most recent global news content, as well as archives which stretch back into the 1980s featuring content from newspapers, newswires, and news sites in active full-text format. This product provides one of the largest collections of news from the US, Canada, Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. Includes ProQuest's Canadian Newsstream, International Newsstream, and US Newstream collections.
Publication Dates Covered: 1960 - present Paid for by K-State Libraries
Features newspapers, magazines, and journals of ethnic and minority presses.
Publication Dates Covered: 1971 - present Paid for by K-State Libraries
This is a good starting point for finding journal articles on almost any topic. Over 150 academic subject areas are covered, and most articles are full-text. Searches can be limited to scholarly, peer-reviewed journals.
Publication Dates Covered: 1890-1982 Paid for by K-State Libraries
Indexes popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States from 1890 through 1982. Includes citations for more than 3 million articles from 375 magazines.
These well-known titles can be found in the above databases and/or as print or microfilmed issues in the Libraries' collections. Follow the links for details about what issues/years we own or have access to.
These free sites offer movie reviews and commentaries of modern films.
These digitized collections offer insight into the history of film.
When a review website like Television Without Pity disappears it's gone forever, right?
Maybe, maybe not if the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine took snapshots of it over the years as part of it's effort to archive the internet.
You can either enter the URL of the site you want into the WayBack Machine (helpful if you are following a dead link) or search using the name of the site to see if was archived.
The WayBack Machine organizes its snapshots of websites by date and the websites themselves are not searchable.
Not every website has been archived, not every page of a website is archived, and the snapshots are taking periodically throughout a year, so if a review was posted and then taken down in between snapshots, you may not be able to find it again.