Finding Film Reviews

Film reviews can be a useful source of information, and recently one of the Librarians helped a student find reviews of the Star Wars films to aid his research.  He was particularly interested in how critics reviewed the special effects used in the films.

If you know the name of a film magazine then you can check the library catalogue directly and see if the magazine is available in the University of Brighton (UoB) libraries or if it is available full text online.   Two names suggested by the librarian were the academic journal ‘Screen‘ and the popular magazine ‘Sight and Sound‘.

A great starting point to finding film reviews is also to use ‘OneSearch‘ on the Online Library page, provided by the UoB. This searches across a huge range of magazines, academic journals, books, ebooks, book reviews and audiovisual sources.

Into the search box of OneSearch we entered “star wars” review

Putting the quotation marks around the phrase ‘star wars’ keeps those words next to each other in the results that are shown, so makes your search more focused.  Capitalisation isn’t necessary when searching.

There were a lot of results, but by then refining them to only show full text articles, and to just show results from magazines and journals, there were lots of results displayed that contained reviews of the films.  To be more focused, the name of any of the star wars films could be added, and we also added keywords: variations of ‘CGI’, ‘visual effects’, ‘special effects’ etc to try and focus the search more to the research the student was doing.

There is a website St Peters House Library subscribes to called Performing Arts Periodicals Database which contains the full text of the magazine ‘Sight and Sound’ going back to 1932, as well as hundreds of other journals/periodicals.  Here there were many film reviews for the Star Wars films which the student found very helpful.

Some useful titles for film research that UoB provides online access to include:

  • Sight and Sound
  • Screen
  • Science Fiction Film and Television
  • Journal of Popular Film and Television
  • Millimeter: The Magazine of Motion Picture and Television Production
  • Film Quarterly

The Librarian team can help with any research enquiry, just ask at the Library Helpdesk, call us or email us (AskSPH@brighton.ac.uk).

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