For the Love of Movies
US, 2010, digital video, color, 80 min.
Directed and written by Gerald Peary, Boston Phoenix critic and one-time Acting Curator of the Harvard Film Archive, For the Love of Movies offers a 100-year history of film criticism through clips from Hollywood movies and illuminating, entertaining interviews with many of America’s key reviewers, including Roger Ebert (The Chicago Sun-Times), A.O. Scott (The New York Times), Lisa Schwarzbaum (Entertainment Weekly), Wesley Morris (The Boston Globe), and Harry Knowles (aintitcoolnews.com).
Narrated by Patricia Clarkson, the documentary explores the beginnings of criticism before The Birth of a Nation through the incendiary Pauline Kael-Andrew Sarris debates of the 60s and 70s, and follows the battle today between youthful one-liners and the print establishment.
The screening will be followed by a panel of prominent Boston-area critics who will be discussing the state of film criticism in the era of the Internet.