Step 1: A Professional Degree

To be a recognized film critic it is very important to have a degree in film studies or any of the allied fields like journalism, cinematography or mass communication. Throughout these courses, students can gain a structural and systematic understanding of the history and aesthetics of a film. You also learn how a film is an important form of mass media in contemporary times. In addition, you also go through a meticulously crafted framework enhancing your critical faculties and approaches to film writing. This basically enables you to work your way towards a professional film critic.

Step 2: Build Experience

This is a significant step in understanding how to become a film critic. It will be an added advantage to your degree to work as an intern during your course and write extensive articles and critical essays on films. The internship will also come as handy for your future career opportunities because that will let you make connections with professionals of this field. You can start your own review website, a blog or vlog etc., as a means to build considerable professional expertise in the field. This is very beneficial since you can collaborate with your peers while building on your creative skills at the same time.

Step 3: Add to your Film Knowledge

While you’re busy studying the theoretical and historical aspects of films, you should also work on building your original knowledge of films independently. Learn from the geniuses of the field and incarnate those ideas to engender a whole array of unique possibilities. Study about different directors, like Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, or contemporaries, such as David Fincher and Martin Scorsese, and understand their techniques, how they built plots and how they changed the whole course of cinematography, primarily for comparative purposes so that you can write your own critiques.

Step 4: Make your Curriculum Vitae

From the day you join this course, keep adding and redesigning your work profile. It is important that as a prospective film critic you enlist your work and projects in an orderly form, highlight major details so that your employer can easily determine your skills and ability as a professional. Today, having a merely traditional style of work profile doesn’t count, you should also have a proactive presence on social media websites, particularly on platforms like Instagram. Such places afford you an option to add to your bio which can be read by your potential employer too.

Step 5: Build Yourself a Name

As a film critic, you should write more and more film reviews for different media publications and magazines on a local scale and then move on to the international level to make your presence known. And, as a maxim, you learn more on the field than in a classroom, therefore connect with and spend more time with those already working in the field and share your ideas with them to develop a professional relationship. Today, you can also use online platforms to maximize your reach and build viewership for yourself. This will give you a major career boost, if not necessarily as an employee for a film company, but surely as an independent film critic.

source : leverageedu.com/blog/how-to-become-a-film-critic/