Independent Film Festival Boston 2009

Director Gerald Peary in attendance.

It is a profession teetering on extinction. At a time when every round of newsroom buyouts seems to portend more pink slips for film critics, The Boston Phoenix’s own Gerald Peary has struck back with an unapologetic argument in favor of the vocation. Taking the historical long view, Peary’s essential documentary chronicles a hundred years of passionate, movie-mad writers scribbling away in the dark. From the early days of Otis Ferguson and Manny Farber through that heated, legendary 1960s war of words between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, all the way up to Harry Knowles and the democratizing dawn of the Internet critic, FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES lobbies for your friendly neighborhood film reviewer––a reader’s last line of defense against the Hollywood marketing machine.

Culled from more than 200 hours of footage shot over the past eight years, FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES boasts informed and often passionate commentary from an all-star cast of pro critics, including Roger Ebert, The New York Times’ A.O. Scott, Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum, The Chicago Tribune’s recently deposed Michael Wilmington, and Boston’s own Wesley Morris. The freewheeling conversation that follows is, as Peary’s title suggests, a chronicle of a passion. What is it that drives these people to spend so many hours a day in darkened rooms? Will there still be a place left at the table for them in our increasingly fractured New Media landscape?

- Vincent Archer

Screening supported by Women In Film & Video/ New England