Under construction
Organizations
British Film Institute: A vast archive of articles, web sources, festival information, and (some) Sight & Sound pieces. User-friendly, high-quality images and design, snazzy and readily accessible/comprehensible to public and scholarly cinephiles.
Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS): The largest professional organization for cinema and media scholars, SCMS hosts an annual international conference that includes hundreds of presentations covering a wide range of subjects in the field. Members can access features of the website including conference, journal, and essay collection Calls for Papers.
Women Make Movies: As the website explains, "Established in 1972 to address the under representation and misrepresentation of women in the media industry, Women Make Movies is a multicultural, multiracial, non-profit media arts organization which facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women." An impressive database of otherwise hard-to-find films by, for example, Sally Potter, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Su Friedrich.
General Articles, Interviews, and Reviews
A.V. Club: The media section of The Onion, this link features shorter reviews of films and interviews with film figures. An entertaining site to browse. Less scholarly or in-depth than other sites.
Bright Lights Film Journal: This comprehensive site includes extensive feature articles, reviews, analysis of a variety of genres and national cinemas.
Cineaste: The web version of the esteemed print journal, this site includes articles, interviews, and reviews (of books, DVDs, and films). Limited access to print content, but also features web exclusives.
Film International: This website, connected with the print journal of the same name, offers interviews, reviews, and articles for a wide audience; slightly less scholarly than Film Quarterly or Cineaste, for example, but nonetheless interesting and relevant.
Film-Philosophy: The title speaks for itself. Look here for articles, film reviews, and book reviews that synthesize film and philosophy; this site also functions as a portal for conference and publication Calls for Papers (CFP) and announcements. Their website describes itself as "an international peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to philosophically discussing film studies, aesthetics and world cinema."
Film Studies for Free: Arguably the most comprehensive and impressively thorough source of online film scholarship; technically a blog, this website exhaustively gathers online links, PDFs, video interviews on a range of topics. A convenient search engine makes past blog entries easily accessible. You could pleasantly lose yourself for hours, following links, reading articles, and viewing interviews and film clips.
Film Quarterly: A slick and useful web component to the popular and esteemed print journal, this site includes "web exclusives" and limited access to the content of each print journal. The site's search engine can provide access to some of the journal's best reviews.
indieWIRE: A "Hollywood Reporter" or "Variety" for independent (or sort-of independent) films. Look here for daily news feeds about awards, deals, interviews, openings, and more. Also includes an impressive collection of renown film figures as bloggers (e.g. Peter Bogdanovich writes about Lang's M, Hitchcock's Psycho)
Jump Cut: This site describes itself as a "review of contemporary media," though--as the journal has been published since 1974--it also offers a useful historical archive of earlier works that once were "contemporary." The journal conceives of its audience as "interested in the radical analysis of mass culture and opposition media."
Movieline: This website came to my attention when Stephanie Zacharek moved here from Salon.com. Her reviews are the highlight of this entertainment news site.
Moving Image Source: The Museum of the Moving Image's snazzy Internet presence includes dazzling video essays, reviews, and articles by leading critics and scholars; the site also features a Research Guide that links not only to material associated with the Museum of the Moving Image but also to associations and resources beyond the Museum's virtual walls. Highly recommended as a site for browsing, visual pleasure, and intellectual inspiration.
Rouge: One of the most lyrical, intelligent, and poetic journals of film scholarship, print or virtual. Learn to write sensitively, carefully, smartly, and beautifully about film by reading these pieces. Works by Adrian Martin, especially recommended.
Scope: A "fully peer-reviewed online journal by staff and students in the Institute of Film & Television Studies at the University of Nottingham," which "provides a forum for discussion of all aspects of film history, theory, and criticism." Features articles in addition to reviews of films, books, and conferences.
Senses of Cinema: A comprehensive database and journal, which features reports on film festivals, reviews of books and films, and articles. Of particular interest might be the Great Directors database, which features encyclopedic entries and some critical analysis/evaluation on, you guessed it, 'great directors.' Also the CTEQ Annotations offer short concise reviews of films old and new.
Sight and Sound: An international film magazine (affiliated with the BFI, see above) that features substantive interviews, reviews, articles, polls, surveys, archives, and more. Particularly of note is the "best films of all time/best directors of all time" poll of directors/critics that happens every ten years (the next ranking will occur in 2012), going back to 1952; this poll is searchable by critics, directors, and films. In short, you can see Thomas Elsaesser's favorite films/directors; you can see which critics/directors chose Citizen Kane as the best; you can see Quentin Tarantino's favorite films/directors, and more. A thrilling way to lose yourself within a critic-director-film labyrinth.
Recommended Film Blogs
Girish Shambu: Hendrix College's first and foremost favorite film blogger is the generous and intelligent Girish Shambu! We were lucky to host him in Spring 2010 for multi-day event that centered around his lecture "Words on the Screen: Film Blogging, Cinephilia, and Internet Film Culture" (he reflects on his visit here). During his visit, Dr. Shambu also introduced and led a discussion of Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star (1960). We invited Dr. Shambu on the basis of his impressive film writing on this blog, which has generated an ever-expanding online community that brings together scholarly and popular cinephiles.
Film Review Digests
Rotten Tomatoes: A comprehensive collection of online film reviews from sources ranging from well-reputed critics to more informal websites. Highly recommended as a starting place for research about any film; click the "top critics" tab to limit your search to the most esteemed film reviewers (e.g. Jonathan Rosenbaum for Chicago Reader, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott for The New York Times, Roger Ebert for Chicago Sun-Times, J. Hoberman for Village Voice, Stephanie Zacharek for Salon.com and recently Movieline).
Movie Review Query Engine