Film journals and research tips
NOTE: You’re writing analytical essays, NOT reviews. Reading a movie reviews might prove useful to you as you work on your essays (though I wouldn't bet on it), but keep in mind that your goals differ significantly from those of a critic who’s writing a review.
You shouldn’t get into a discussion of the movie’s overall quality just as you shouldn’t offer your rating of a Shakespeare play or a Hemingway novella in a paper you write for a literature course. Whether a movie or Hamlet or The Old Man and the Sea gets two thumbs up from you isn’t the point. The point of an analytical essay is to analyze aspects of the text or texts (and yes, films are texts) in order to prove a discovery-type thesis statement (see the online writing handouts for details about thesis construction and evaluation: http://sean.heuston.googlepages.com/writinghandouts).
In general, when you’re looking for sources you ought to prioritize critical essays in scholarly journals; books of criticism; and critical essays in essay collections. Movie reviews may contain useful insights, but the other types of writing are generally more in line with the type of writing you’ll be expected to produce.
Here are a couple of web pages with useful information:
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/filmstudies/reviewslist.html
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/filmstudies/index.html
Here are some good film journals:
Cinema Journal
Film Quarterly
Cineaste
Journal of Film and Video
Camera Obscura
Film-Philosophy
Journal of Moving Image Studies
Film and History
Cahiers du Cinema
Film Criticism
Sight and Sound
This list is by no means comprehensive, but it's a good starting point. You should also talk to reference librarians in the Daniel Library, check out the Daniel Library’s databases to search for journal articles, and see below for more tips.
Google Scholar ( http://scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en&tab=ws ) is a specialized version of the regular Google search engine that searches only scholarly sources. That means you get more useful results and fewer unreliable results from random web pages
You should also check out Amazon.com to see what kinds of books have been published in recent years and/or what's out there that's not in local libraries. A few years ago, Amazon added a function called “Search Inside.” If you search for “Civil Rights” and click on a book that offers the “Search Inside” function, you’ll see that that function is basically a search engine that searches the entire book for you. For instance, if you search for “Martin Luther King,” the “Search Inside” function will list all the references to King in that book. You can then click on any of those references and see an image of the actual page of the book. (You’ll need to establish an Amazon account to see the image, but that’s free, quick, and easy.)
Amazon still wants you to buy books instead of reading them for free online, so Amazon won’t let you read more than a couple of pages in either direction from a particular reference, but that’s still a VERY handy feature that can save you LOTS of time as you’re doing research. You can instantly get a sense of whether a particular book is likely to be of use to you. That’s much more efficient than tracking down a book in the library and discovering the book isn’t useful to you. It’s much, MUCH more efficient than ordering a book through inter-library loan, waiting for the book to arrive, and then discovering that the book isn’t useful to you.