James Berardinelli (born
September 1967) is an America
online film
critic.
Biography
Berardinelli was born in New Brunswick,
New Jersey
, and spent his early childhood in Morristown
. At the age of nine, he moved to Cherry
Hill
. He attended the University of
Pennsylvania
from 1985 through 1990, obtaining both a BS and MS
in Electrical
Engineering. After graduating he worked at Bellcore, now
Telcordia Technologies, and
spent the next 15 years working "in a variety of fields, including
fiber optics, video testing, and
software systems." In 2004, he married one
of his longtime readers.
Film critic
Berardinelli admits that, as a child, he did not spend much time in
theaters, and as a teenager saw only five or six movies a year. He
did not get interested in film until he was in college. In 1991,
the year before he started reviewing, he saw about 30 films. The
number jumped up to 180 in 1992, when he wrote reviews for his own
use. Starting in 1993, the year in which he started publishing his
reviews in
Usenet, he began seeing between
220 and 250 theatrical releases per year. In 1997 he became an
accredited film critic and now estimates that he has seen over 7000
films in total.
Berardinelli has over 3,300 full-length movie reviews posted on his
own ReelViews website, as well as being a prominent contributor to
such sites as
Rotten Tomatoes. He
has established an average of roughly 300 reviews a year since the
site was inaugurated in January 1996. According to Berardinelli,
his website receives 70,000-80,000 hits per day.
Fellow film critic
Roger Ebert has
written positive comments about Berardinelli, even going so far as
to write forewords for the ReelViews books. In Ebert's review of
Saving Silverman, he
called Berardinelli "the best of the Web-based critics."
Berardinelli also writes
ReelThoughts, a
blog in which he muses on issues of the day or whatever
is on his mind. While there is no publication schedule
per
se, he usually finds time to write a few entries a week.
Frequent topics of his columns include
DVD
technology, the
film industry,
film piracy, and
censorship, but he doesn't shy away from such
issues as politics and society. He frequently criticizes the
Motion Picture
Association of America's ratings board and the inconsistency of
the ratings system, deriding them for, among other things, affixing
"R" ratings to films for arguably mild artistic nudity, while
simultaneously deeming blood-soaked violence to be PG or PG-13
material.
Berardinelli rates films for his website on a
star basis,
between zero and four stars. In addition, the use of the
half-star rating is also applied. Several films, to date,
have received no stars.
Berardinelli's favorite directors include
Steven Spielberg,
Martin Scorsese,
Akira Kurosawa and
Alfred Hitchcock. His all-time favorite
film is
Patton. Recent films
which made it to his top 100 films include
The Departed, currently at #82,
The Dark Knight at
#85, and
Munich at #91.
References
- ReelThoughts
- ReelThoughts
- ReelThoughts
- Ebert's Review
- Ebert's review of Saving Silverman
-
http://www.reelviews.net/fullsearchresult.php?searchstring=1&searchtype=10
- James Berardinelli (2003), "ReelViews : The Ultimate Guide to
the Best 1,000 Modern Movies on DVD and Video" ISBN
1-932112-06-5
- James Berardinelli (2005), "ReelViews 2: The Ultimate Guide to
the Best 1,000 Modern Movies on DVD and Video, 2005 Edition" ISBN
1-932112-40-5
External links
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