What makes a good film? Thoughts on teaching film criticism and evaluation

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In this lecture, I will reflect on my experiences of teaching film criticism and evaluation to university students at Bristol and elsewhere. The value judgements that we routinely make about works of art in our own lives (where it would be quite common to say, for example, that a movie is “good” or “bad”) have an uneasy place in the academic study of the arts. I will consider some of the challenges involved in helping students acknowledge the evaluative dimension to film criticism, some of the issues involved that my students have helped to illuminate for me and some the ways in which this has affected my own understanding and love of film.