Welcome to www.afilmcanon.com
The nature of this website has changed considerably over the few years that I've been working on it. At the moment, I'm trying to fill in reviews of films released between 1960 and the present - I'll add and rework my reviews of films prior to 1960 sometime in the future, since many of those reviews were written when the website was in a very formative stage. I've arranged the films by release date, so if you're looking for a title (unless it's a new or recent release), it's best to go to the chronological menu, to see if it's been added, or to simply use the internal search engine.
Insofar as the website has an overarching thesis, it's my sense that film criticism, as an institution, is dead - and that this is a good thing. In a world in which academic film writing is increasingly idiosyncratic and generous, and film fandom is increasingly sophisticated and multilayered, and in which films are released on more platforms than ever before, there seems to be very little need for traditional film critics, who increasingly turn to negative and canonical pronouncements as a way of bolstering and reinforcing their authority. Even most good reviews these days read like nested bad reviews - a film is good because because it's not Hollywood, not mainstream, not a B-movie, etc. Like most academics and fans, I'm not especially interested in bad reviews - unless they're memorably insightful or memorably vitriolic, which is rarely the case - and so my own reviews tend to be reparative, to try and recover whatever is interesting or idiosyncratic about a film, however little or however much cultural capital or cache it may seem to have. I do sometimes use academic terminology, but only when I think it really elucidates what I'm trying to say about the film, and I always try and evoke the pleasure of viewing. It's ultimately an acanonical project - not the film canon, but a film canon.
For typographic and formatting reasons, the website is best viewed on a Safari browser.
Feel free to contact me at billynotwilliam2@gmail.com
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'Equally valuable would be acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art. This seems even harder to do than formal analysis.'
- Susan Sontag, 'Against Interpretation'