Film criticism is the study and assessment of movies. In general, these works can be put into two groups: those written by film scholars and those written by journalists for newspapers and other media.
Most of what newspaper, magazine, and TV critics do is review movies that have just come out. Most of the time, they only see a movie once and have only a day or two to think about it. Even so, critics have a big effect on movies, especially certain types of movies. Action, horror, and comedy movies that are made for a wide audience usually don't care much what a critic thinks about them as a whole. The plot summary and description of a movie, which make up most of a review, can still have a big effect on whether or not someone decides to see it. Reviews have a huge effect on prestige films like most dramas. Most of the time, bad reviews doom a movie to be forgotten and lose money.
It's not clear how much of an effect a reviewer has on how well a movie does at the box office. Some people say that marketing for movies is now so strong and well-funded that critics can't do anything about it. But the disastrous failure of some heavily promoted movies that got bad reviews and the unexpected success of independent movies that got good reviews show that extreme critical reactions can have a lot of power. Others say that good reviews of little-known movies have been shown to get people interested in them. On the other hand, there have been a few movies in which the studios were so doubtful that they wouldn't let reviewers see the movie early so that it wouldn't get bad reviews everywhere. But this usually doesn't work because reviewers catch on to the trick and warn people that the movie might not be worth seeing. As a result, the movies usually don't do well at the box office.
Some people say that journalists who review movies should not be called film critics. Instead, they should just be called film reviewers. Most of the time, this kind of work is called film theory or film studies. These movie critics try to figure out how movies and filmmaking techniques work and how they affect people. Their articles don't appear in newspapers or on TV. Instead, they are published in scholarly journals or sometimes in high-end magazines. Most of the time, they are also linked to colleges or universities.
