- James Berardinelli
Infobox Writer
name = James Berardinelli
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birth_date = birth date and age|1967|09|01
birth_place = New Brunswick,New Jersey , USA
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occupation = Film critic
nationality = American
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subject =Film
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website = http://www.reelviews.net/master.html
footnotes =James Berardinelli (born
September 1967) is anonline film critic .Biography
Berardinelli was born in
New Brunswick, New Jersey to anItalian-American family, and spent his early childhood in Morristown. At the age of nine, he moved to Cherry Hill. He attended theUniversity of Pennsylvania from 1985 through 1990, obtaining both a BS and MS inElectrical Engineering . After graduating he worked at Bellcore, nowTelcordia Technologies , and spent the next 15 years working "in a variety of fields, includingfiber optics , video testing, andsoftware systems" [ [http://reelviews.net/faq.html#1 ReelThoughts ] ] . In 2004, he married one of his longtime readers. [ [http://reelviews.net/faq.html#2 ReelThoughts ] ]Film critic
Berardinelli admits that, as a child, he did not spend much time in theaters, and as a teenager saw only five or six movies a year. He did not get interested in film until he was in college. In 1991, the year before he started reviewing, he saw about 30 films. The number jumped up to 180 in 1992, when he wrote reviews for his own use. Starting in 1993, the year in which he started publishing his reviews in
Usenet , he began seeing between 220 and 250 theatrical releases per year. In 1997 he became an accredited film critic and now estimates that he has seen over 7000 films in total.Berardinelli has over 3,300 full-length movie reviews posted on his own ReelViews website, as well as being a prominent contributor to such sites as
Rotten Tomatoes . He has established an average of roughly 300 reviews a year since the site was inaugurated in January 1996. According to Berardinelli, his website receives 70,000–80,000 hits per day. [ [http://www.reelviews.net/faq.html#21 ReelThoughts ] ]Fellow film critic
Roger Ebert has written positive comments about Berardinelli [ [http://www.reelviews.net/movies/SPECIAL/ebert.html Ebert's Review ] ] , even going so far as to write forewords for the ReelViews books. In his review ofSaving Silverman , Ebert called Berardinelli "the best of the Web-based critics" [ [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20010209/REVIEWS/102090302/1023 Ebert's review of Saving Silverman] ]Berardinelli also writes "ReelThoughts", a
blog in which he muses on issues of the day or whatever is on his mind. While there is no publication schedule "per se", he usually finds time to write a few entries a week. Frequent topics of his columns includeDVD technology, thefilm industry ,film piracy , andcensorship , but he doesn't shy away from such issues as politics and society. He frequently criticizes theMotion Picture Association of America 's ratings board and the inconsistency of the ratings system, deriding them for, among other things, affixing "R" ratings to films for arguably mild artistic nudity, while simultaneously deeming blood-soaked violence to be PG or PG-13 material.Berardinelli rates films for his website on a "star" basis, with a maximum of four stars for superb films. In addition, the use of the "half-star" rating is also applied. Several films, to date, have received no stars.
Berardinelli's favorite directors include
Steven Spielberg ,Martin Scorsese ,Akira Kurosawa andAlfred Hitchcock . His all-time favorite film is "Patton".References
* James Berardinelli (2003), "ReelViews : The Ultimate Guide to the Best 1,000 Modern Movies on DVD and Video" ISBN 1-932112-06-5
* James Berardinelli (2005), "ReelViews 2: The Ultimate Guide to the Best 1,000 Modern Movies on DVD and Video, 2005 Edition" ISBN 1-932112-40-5External links
* [http://www.reelviews.net/ ReelViews: Movie Reviews and Criticism by James Berardinelli]
* [http://www.rottentomatoes.com/author-117/about.php James Berardinelli's autobiography on Rotten Tomatoes]
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